Hi, I wanted to animate a sequence of 2D data on the faces of a rectangular box and found that there was no good solution. plot_surface() is very slow for the purpose of animation. contourf() is very fast however the contours cannot reveal details down to pixel level.

I understand that the AxesImage class is still not implemented in mplot3d and require a lot of development. On the other hand, the 2D tools pcolor() and pcolormesh() might already be a good target to be employed in 3D, just like contourf() because they generate collections objects. I tried to implement this with my limited knowledge of the mplot3d API, but were not successful.

Therefore, here I put in a feature request and hopefully it can be included in the near future releases of matplotlib. Thanks in advance for the work.