A somewhat off topic note: that gganimate GIF is <i>3.5 MB</i>, which is a very large file for a image that is not central to the argument!<p>That&#x27;s one of the reasons I was dissuaded from making GIFs from my ggplot2 charts, and it&#x27;s why I created a Convert Frames to GIF tool (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;frames-to-gif-osx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;frames-to-gif-osx</a>) to create higher-quality GIFs at manageable file sizes. (the first example GIF in my repo is about the same number of frames and resolution as the OP&#x27;s GIF, but 1&#x2F;7th of the filesize, of course due to the nature of GIFs this is not a straight comparison) That said, gganimate does sound like an interesting tool, and certainly much better than the animation package alone.<p>The killer feature of ggplot2 that cannot easily be replicated in any GUI program is indeed faceting. There are also other geoms that are hard to do in base R&#x2F;excel are things, like contour maps and native smoothed regression lines (with confidence intervals!)