Q:

Animating with matplotlib without animation function

Is there a way to animate a graph in matplotlib without resorting to the built in animation functions? I find them extremely awkward to use and feel it would be much simpler to just plot a point, wipe the graph, then plot the next point. 
I envision something such as:
def f():
     # do stuff here
     return x, y, t

where each t would be a different frame. 
I mean, I've tried stuff like using plt.clf(), plt.close() etc. but nothing seems to work. 

A:

It is sure possible to animate without FuncAnimation. The purpose of "the enivisioned function", however, is not really clear. In an animation, the time is the independent variable, i.e. for each time step you produce some new data to plot or similar. Therefore the function would take t as an input and give some data back.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

def f(t):
    x=np.random.rand(1)
    y=np.random.rand(1)
    return x,y

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.set_xlim(0,1)
ax.set_ylim(0,1)
for t in range(100):
    x,y = f(t)
    # optionally clear axes and reset limits
    #plt.gca().cla() 
    #ax.set_xlim(0,1)
    #ax.set_ylim(0,1)
    ax.plot(x, y, marker="s")
    ax.set_title(str(t))
    fig.canvas.draw()
    plt.pause(0.1)

plt.show()

Also, it is not clear why you would want to avoid FuncAnimation. The same animation as above can be produced with FuncAnimation as follows:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation
import numpy as np

def f(t):
    x=np.random.rand(1)
    y=np.random.rand(1)
    return x,y

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.set_xlim(0,1)
ax.set_ylim(0,1)

def update(t):
    x,y = f(t)
    # optionally clear axes and reset limits
    #plt.gca().cla() 
    #ax.set_xlim(0,1)
    #ax.set_ylim(0,1)
    ax.plot(x, y, marker="s")
    ax.set_title(str(t))

ani = matplotlib.animation.FuncAnimation(fig, update, frames=100)
plt.show()

There is not much changed, you have the same number of lines, nothing really awkward to see here.
Plus you have all the benefits from FuncAnimation when the animation gets more complex, when you want to repeat the animation, when you want to use blitting, or when you want to export it to a file.

