Add intro animations to basic plotly charts

[devxpy]

A lot of modern JS charting libraries support intro animations like these:

Screen.Recording.2025-05-19.at.2.02.10.PM.mov

I love using Plotly as a Pythonista and would like to make it look modern and fancy like the other charting libraries.

Does plotly have intro animations out of the box? If not, would this be relatively simple for me to add as a contributor to plotly.js? I am pretty proficient with javascript and can help.

My thought was to add this to the basic charts like go.Bar go.Pie & go.Scatter with a flag like enable_intro_anims so users can enable/disable them as per their choice.

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I asked cursor to give me some sample code for how this can be done, and it looks like Plotly.animate can achieve this!

Screen.Recording.2025-05-19.at.2.28.48.PM.mov

Here's the code - https://jsfiddle.net/am6914fb/5/

[ndrezn]

Love the idea! It's always nice to expose functionality that exists with a more accessible API.

Where are you thinking within the figure object this flag could be added? It might make sense to live in the layout object as a top-level parameter 🤔 @alexcjohnson do you know if this is an idea we've considered in the past?

[ndrezn]

For context, it was an active design decision to not add startup animations to Plotly charts (which are most often used in a scientific context, where animations might not make sense: for example, it would get old to see the same animation re-run every time you execute a Jupyter cell). To that end if added, startup animations should be opt-in rather than opt-out.