I recently came across this animated bar chart from visualcapitalist. It depicts the top 10 GDPs (in US Dollars) in each year over the last several decades:
I took the GDP data from OECD* and replicated the visualization in Power BI using a custom visualization called Play Axis. For the sake of comparison, I also made an animated bubble map using the custom Mapbox Visual, along with a more standard line chart that showed each of the highlighted countries' change over time. These alternates are on pages 2 and 3.
The animated charts are interesting and dynamic: they show the countries' many changes and jostling of positions over time. They're great for storytelling; however, in visualizing the data in this way, the audience loses the ability to track a country over time at any given point.
*Note: there's some discrepancy between the OECD data I used and the data the creator of the visualcapitalist bar chart used.