Problem

It's tricky to learn that you should useset_data when animating. When i first got into this I was essentially doing:

fortinrange(timepoints):ax.imshow(data[t])

which is bad news for performance. I fortunately had someone around to tell me to useset_data but lacking that I think it would have taken me a lot longer to figure out.

However, even after figuring that out it's not all smooth sailing. I was tripped up for quite awhile on how to animate a scatter plot as it usesset_offsets instead ofset_data. There can also be other complications see for example#18401.

Suggested Improvement

Include a reference style example in the animation section of the gallery that goes over how to animate all the possible animatable artists (set_data,set_offsets, etc...). Or at least all of the artists that get returned from pyplot functions. Ideally the example would use the artists created from pyplot(or equivalentax) functions as this is how I imagine most people will create the artists for their animations.

For reference I brought this up on gitter, but gitter just crashed :(

Matplotlib version

• Matplotlib documentation version: any