I ended up writing some very rudimentary HTML canvas + javascript drawing code into the notebook and for my purposes it's fast and does the job. Just to note to others, that this is a possibility within a Jupyter notebook.
One obvious benefit is that it can start rendering "live" and continuously and doesn't have to generate the whole animation before starting to show it.
One obvious benefit is that it can start rendering "live" and continuously and doesn't have to generate the whole animation before starting to show it.