@philippjfr Even with the alteration I still get a HoloMap type not found (using HV 1.9.5) error. I can still see the animation, though. And switching to 'Agg' did allow me to save the animation in mp4, which is good. All workarounds aside, this works pretty well. Thanks a lot to all.

@philippjfr Thanks for the comment. I hand't found anything like that. For me, %%output isn't a recognized magic command, and the renderer.save command fails for me with a tkinter-related error (can't invoke "wm" command), so I really couldn't see anything yet. But I believe I'll be able to solve that eventually.

I didn't know holoviews existed, thanks for pointing that out to me. The fact that it can't create an animation file (as far as I could tell so far) does mean I can't use it, though. So I'll still try to pursue the matplotlib animation option, although maybe for most users holoviews+xarray might already be enough (I don't know).

Unfortunately I don't have any example with DataArray right now. Since I never could take advantage of DataArray's plotting capabilities for animations, I always did animations using pure Numpy. However, I'm talking about the standard matplotlib animations. Here's an example taken from here:

```import numpy as np import matplotlib matplotlib.use("Agg") import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.animation as animation

def update_line(num, data, line): line.set_data(data[..., :num]) return line,

Set up formatting for the movie files

Writer = animation.writers['ffmpeg'] writer = Writer(fps=15, metadata=dict(artist='Me'), bitrate=1800)

fig1 = plt.figure()

data = np.random.rand(2, 25) l, = plt.plot([], [], 'r-') plt.xlim(0, 1) plt.ylim(0, 1) plt.xlabel('x') plt.title('test') line_ani = animation.FuncAnimation(fig1, update_line, 25, fargs=(data, l), interval=50, blit=True) line_ani.save('lines.mp4', writer=writer) ```

If you have some directions on a smart way to bring xarray into the picture, maybe I can try to come up with an example that might evolve into a contribution.