For some reason this wasn't overly clear in the documentation, but a simple way to make an animation using the default backend in matplotlib is something like this:
from numpy import random, array, arange
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.ion()
print "starting"
x = arange(100)
y = 2*random.rand(100)
line, = plt.plot(x, y, 'd-')
for i in arange(1,200):
y = y + random.rand(100) - 0.500000
line.set_data(x, y)
ax = line.get_axes()
ax.relim()
ax.autoscale_view()
plt.draw() # redraw the canvas
plt.show()