Canvas.restore_region() Not Working

I was trying to follow the instructions on: http://wiki.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/Animations Why is the code below not showing the expected behaviour? (see comments in code on

Solution 1:

As @tcaswell said, you need to force a draw() call begore background = canvas.copy_from_bbox(ax.bbox). Try

...
canvas = ax.figure.canvas
canvas.draw()
background = canvas.copy_from_bbox(ax.bbox)  
...