My sense is that animated visualizations are good at giving an intuitive sense about performance, but static visualizations are better for understanding how an algorithm works. If I was implementing a sorting algorithm I'd rather have one of Cortesi's visualizations on hand.
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This came up on HN a couple of weeks back - http://www.algomation.com/
A few sorting algorithms - http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/
Visualization of Path-Finding Algorithms - http://qiao.github.io/PathFinding.js/visual/
Lastly, Mike Bostock (creator of D3) has a really cool bunch of algorithms over at his blog - http://bost.ocks.org/mike/
I like Cortesi's take on algorithm visualization: http://corte.si/posts/code/visualisingsorting/index.html
My sense is that animated visualizations are good at giving an intuitive sense about performance, but static visualizations are better for understanding how an algorithm works. If I was implementing a sorting algorithm I'd rather have one of Cortesi's visualizations on hand.