A type of animated, interactive graphics was presented to the world by Hans Rosling of the Gapminder Foundation in a TED talk. The bubble plots that were presented clearly showed changes for several variables over time. Paul Murrell has produced an animated ggplot2 plot based on the Gapminder bubble plots.
We can see that over time, for all continents, the general trend is that as the number of children per woman decreases, it is associated with an increase in life expectancy. It is interesting to see how it is possible to observe significant events such as wars occurring.