As this question is tagged as CSS, I would like to contribute a pure CSS solution to this, simply use CSS3 @keyframes and you can simply add colors to the element you want, can step the animation using % and also, you can use animation-iteration-count and set it to infinite. If you want to iterate it for limited times, just changed the infinite to whatever value you desire but make sure it's an integer.

Demo

.animate {
    height: 200px;
    width: 400px;
    border: 1px solid #000;
    -webkit-animation: animate_bg 5s;
    animation: animate_bg 5s;
    -webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
    animation-iteration-count: infinite;
}

@keyframes animate_bg {
    0%   {background:red;}
    50%  {background:green;}
    100% {background:blue;}
}

@-webkit-keyframes animate_bg {
    0%   {background:red;}
    50%  {background:green;}
    100% {background:blue;}
}

This is introduced in CSS3 spec, so you can refer this link for browser support.

There are many polyfills available for the browsers which are not supporting CSS3 @keyframes, so you may need to use this if you are looking to support older browsers, if you don't care about the old one's, than you can use this without any hesitation.