The images were not removed, the ability to display remote images was disabled, that's quite different, so moderators cannot restore the images. The board still has some animated smileys, which are in the additional smileys popup on the post screen.
For some reasons (a quirk of the board) some of the disabled display image links are not active, so if you find such a link that isn't clickable, please use the Report to Moderator link on it to alert us to the problem and we can fix it.