This article describes how to create animation in R using the gganimate R package.

gganimate is an extension of the ggplot2 package for creating animated ggplots. It provides a range of new functionality that can be added to the plot object in order to customize how it should change with time.

Key features of gganimate:

• transitions: you want your data to change
• views: you want your viewpoint to change
• shadows: you want the animation to have memory

Contents:

Prerequisites

gganimate stable version is available on CRAN and can be installed with install.packages('gganimate'). The latest development version can be installed as follow: devtools::install_github('thomasp85/gganimate').

Note that, in this tutorial, we used the latest developmental version.

Load required packages and set the default ggplot2 theme to theme_bw():

library(ggplot2)
library(gganimate)
theme_set(theme_bw())

Demo dataset

library(gapminder)
head(gapminder)

## # A tibble: 6 x 6
##   country     continent  year lifeExp      pop gdpPercap
##   <fct>       <fct>     <int>   <dbl>    <int>     <dbl>
## 1 Afghanistan Asia       1952    28.8  8425333      779.
## 2 Afghanistan Asia       1957    30.3  9240934      821.
## 3 Afghanistan Asia       1962    32.0 10267083      853.
## 4 Afghanistan Asia       1967    34.0 11537966      836.
## 5 Afghanistan Asia       1972    36.1 13079460      740.
## 6 Afghanistan Asia       1977    38.4 14880372      786.

Static plot

p <- ggplot(
  gapminder, 
  aes(x = gdpPercap, y=lifeExp, size = pop, colour = country)
  ) +
  geom_point(show.legend = FALSE, alpha = 0.7) +
  scale_color_viridis_d() +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  scale_x_log10() +
  labs(x = "GDP per capita", y = "Life expectancy")
p

Transition through distinct states in time