# SOLVED: Animations and "\_display has no backend"

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/solved-animations-and-display-has-no-backend/28024>\
**Category:** Visualization\
**Tags:** animations\
**Created:** [August 27, 2019, 4:11am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/solved-animations-and-display-has-no-backend/28024 "2019-08-27T04:11:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Brad\_Hines](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/brad_hines/32/9885_2.png) [@Brad\_Hines](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Brad_Hines)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 4:11am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/solved-animations-and-display-has-no-backend/28024/1 "2019-08-27T04:11:06Z")

</div>

Recording this just in case it helps someone else in the future.

I have a function that sometimes I use for animation, and sometimes just to pop up an image.

It had been working great, then suddenly failed with “\_display has no backend.”

The reason is that I called Plot.gui() to get an image. But apparently what happens when you call “Animation()” is that it swaps in a different backend (makes sense now). So when you go to get an on-screen display, there isn’t one.

It would be nice if Animation could be updated to forward gui() requests to whatever the backend was before Animation got activated.

Although, as I saw and logged in an earlier message, if you select a backend before calling Animation(), it fails with a world age error.

So in general, I guess this is a quiet suggestion to make Animation play a little better with the other backends when it’s active, so that these errors don’t happen. It would have saved me 2 or 3 hours, at any rate… so hopefully it helps someone else.