Creating Animated Visualization in R

Animation
Visualization
ggplot
R
gganimate
In this blog post, I would demonstrate how to create an animated visualizations in R using the gapminder dataset from the gapminder package in R.
Author

Olumide Oyalola

Published

January 26, 2023

How to create animated visualizations using R

Static visualizations that are publication ready are readily available in R using the ggplot2 package. However, there are times where it’s required to illustrate the change in an event overtime. This is a particular use case of the gganimate package in R which is an extension of the ggplot2 package for creating animated ggplots.

It provides a range of functionalities that can be added to the plot object in order to customize how it should change with time.

The gganimate package is available on CRAN and it can be installed by running the code chunk below from the Rstudio console.

Code
install.packages("gganimate")

The Data

The gapminder dataset in R is an excerpt of the Gapminder data on life expectancy, GDP per capita, and population by country.

The gapminder package is available on CRAN and it can be installed by running the code chunk below from the Rstudio console.

Code
install.packages("gapminder")

Load Packages

Code 
Loading required package: pacman
Warning: package 'pacman' was built under R version 4.0.5
Code
pacman::p_load(
  tidyverse,
  gganimate,
  gapminder
)

theme_set(theme_bw())

Load Demo Dataset

Code
data(gapminder)

A closer look at the dataset

  • If you’re new to the gapminder dataset, below is the structure of the dataset which includes the variables and sample data.
Code
glimpse(gapminder)
Rows: 1,704
Columns: 6
$ country   <fct> "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", ~
$ continent <fct> Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, ~
$ year      <int> 1952, 1957, 1962, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, ~
$ lifeExp   <dbl> 28.801, 30.332, 31.997, 34.020, 36.088, 38.438, 39.854, 40.8~
$ pop       <int> 8425333, 9240934, 10267083, 11537966, 13079460, 14880372, 12~
$ gdpPercap <dbl> 779.4453, 820.8530, 853.1007, 836.1971, 739.9811, 786.1134, ~

Static Plot

Code
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_continuous(labels = scales::comma) +
  labs(x = "GDP per capita", y = "Life expectancy")
p

Transition through distinct states in time

Basics

Key R function: transition_time().

  • The transition length between the states will be set to correspond to the actual time difference between them.

Label variables: frame_time.

  • Gives the time that the current frame corresponds to.
Code
p + transition_time(year) +
  labs(title = "Year: {frame_time}")
Warning: No renderer available. Please install the gifski, av, or magick
package to create animated output
NULL

Create facets by continent:

Code
p + facet_wrap(~continent) +
  transition_time(year) +
  labs(title = "Year: {frame_time}")
Warning: No renderer available. Please install the gifski, av, or magick
package to create animated output
NULL

Let the view follow the data in each frame

Code
p + transition_time(year) +
  labs(title = "Year: {frame_time}") +
  view_follow(fixed_y = TRUE)
Warning: No renderer available. Please install the gifski, av, or magick
package to create animated output
NULL
Code
pop_ng <- gapminder %>% 
  filter(country == "Nigeria") %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = year, y = pop, fill = pop)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity", show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_fill_distiller(palette = "Reds", direction = 1) +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(
    panel.grid = element_blank(),
    panel.grid.major.y = element_line(color = "white"),
    panel.ontop = TRUE
  ) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::unit_format(unit = "M", scale = 1e-6)) +
  geom_text(aes(label = paste0(round(pop/1000000,1), "M")))

pop_ng

Code
pop_ng + transition_time(year) +
  shadow_mark() +
  labs(x = "Year",
       y = "Population",
       title = "Year: {frame_time}")
Warning: No renderer available. Please install the gifski, av, or magick
package to create animated output
NULL

Save Animation

If you need to save the animation for later use you can use the anim_save() function.

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