title: Matplotlib movies from complete figures without using setData
body: <p>I am interested in making movies using matplotlib. Examples I've seen so far, such as <a href="http://matplotlib.org/examples/animation/moviewriter.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this one for moviewriter</a>, seem to have you editing the data in-place for each frame. This is very efficient, avoiding redrawing the parts of the image that stay the same each time. However, it can be clunky for rapid data exploration. I would like a recipe that lets me simply take a fully drawn figure as each frame (clearing the same figure object each time is fine).</p>
  
  <p>The reason for this: I often create moderately complicated figures using custom functions, with a form like <code>plotme(ax, data, **options)</code>. Often I develop these functions without animations in mind, and later want to animate the figures by calling the plotting function in a loop. I don't want to have to change the logic of the functions to "setData" of existing artists in the figure for each frame.</p>