Matplotlib FuncAnimation frame not rendering when a new artist added

Question

I am making an animation in Matplotlib where new artists (specifically patches) are added every few frames, but when I run it, every frame in which a new artist is added is completely blank. I know there is some issue with the blitting since it works when I turn that off, but I need it on. I return every shape that is created or modified in each frame, just like the documentation requires. I am using the MacOSX backend.

My code looks similar to this:

from random import random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.animation import FuncAnimation

fig = plt.figure()
axe = fig.add_axes([0, 0, 1, 1], frameon=False)
circles = []

def update(i):
    if not i % 10:
        new_circle = plt.Circle((random(), random()), 0.05, color='black')
        axe.add_patch(new_circle)
        circles.append(new_circle)

    for circle in circles:
        circle.center = (random(), random())

    return circles

animation = FuncAnimation(fig, update, frames=60, interval=1000/30, repeat=False, blit=True)
plt.show()

Answer 1

This appears to be a bug with matplotlib in the MacOSX backend, so the solution is just to work around it by using a different backend or not blitting if possible.