@Carreau I can reproduce your behavior that it auto-displays properly with the assert removed but we get just a normal repr if the assertion is present. Weird. None of this makes sense, because the ...

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.animation as animation %matplotlib inline def updatefig(i): fig = plt.gcf() ax = plt.gca() ax.plot(i,i, "o") updatefig(10) # works plt.figure() # ...