think you need to trigger the animation to render. You can do this directly with anim.to_jshtml () or anim.to_html5_video (). Should also work by having anim at the end of the cell...BUT: On my system ...

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() # ...