How to animate text in Matplotlib?

Question

I am trying to animate a text box in a Matplotlib figure, but can't seem to get it working. Does anyone know how to do this properly? An example is below.

from matplotlib import animation
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

times = ['first', 'second', 'third']

time_text = ax.text(.5, .5, '', fontsize=15)


def updatefig(num):
    global mt
    mt = ax.text(.5, .5, times[num], fontsize=15)

anim = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, updatefig, frames=len(times)-1, blit=True, init_func=init)

Answer 1

Text is an artist and you animate it exactly like any other artist:

def updatefig(num):
    time_text.set_text(times[num])
    return time_text,