figmanager.canvas.draw speed issue

I am trying to make an animation. The examples provided in matplotlib work
very well. In my own closely related code, I am plotting 3 lines, each
containing 5000 doubles. Calls to manager.canvas.draw() take 0.4 seconds on
my speedy gentoo setup, 0.15 seconds if I dont use mathtext tick labels. So I
dont think this has anything to do with my numerix setup.

Is there a way around re-rendering the entire canvas?

Thanks,

Darren