There's probably a bug a here, one that I don't understand, but you can work around this by using ipywidgets in a more manual fashion.

The issue is probably (maybe?) something to do with a weird sideeffect of using interactive which tries to display things. For this kind of thing I'd recommend just directly observeing the slider. Like so:
(this works for me on mpl 3.3.2)

import numpy as np
import ipywidgets as widgets
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from IPython.display import display

%matplotlib notebook

class MWE:

    def __init__(self):
        self.fig, self.ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)
        self.ax.set_xlim([-5, 105])
        self.ax.set_ylim([-500, 10500])
        self.create_widget()
        self.draw()

    def create_widget(self):
        self.slider = widgets.IntSlider(value=50, min=0, max=100)
        self.slider.observe(self.update_value, names='value')
        display(self.slider)
        self.value = 0

    def draw(self):
        self.ax.plot(self.value, self.value**2, 'o')

    def update_value(self, change):
        self.value = change['new']
        self.draw()

MWE()

If you're including matplotlib in a layout with ipywidgets you may also want to use ipympl as that makes matplotlib plots widgets so they can be explicitly positioned in a layout. See the examples here: https://github.com/matplotlib/ipympl/blob/master/examples/ipympl.ipynb

If I run that code and try to use the pan or zoom tools I get a lot of

[IPKernelApp] WARNING | No such comm: 4f2b7240901a460b95631937d0b342c9
[IPKernelApp] WARNING | No such comm: 4f2b7240901a460b95631937d0b342c9
[IPKernelApp] WARNING | No such comm: 4f2b7240901a460b95631937d0b342c9
[IPKernelApp] WARNING | No such comm: 4f2b7240901a460b95631937d0b342c9
[IPKernelApp] WARNING | No such comm: 4f2b7240901a460b95631937d0b342c9
[IPKernelApp] WARNING | No such comm: 4f2b7240901a460b95631937d0b342c9
[IPKernelApp] WARNING | No such comm: 4f2b7240901a460b95631937d0b342c9
[IPKernelApp] WARNING | No such comm: 4f2b7240901a460b95631937d0b342c9

which makes me think that something has gone sideways with the display logic (and our js hacking and the ipywidget display work are colliding) which results in the comm (how the JS front end talks to the python backend) being torn down prematurely.

Thanks @ianhi , that works for this example. However, the real examples has various sliders, dropdowns, buttons, that are aligned horizontally etc. Does that approach work for a complex setup?

@prisae yup it should. You may need to be careful to use one of the ipywidgets layouts either the highlevel AppLayout or nest VBox and HBox elements. Two examples for you:

1. the above linked examples for ipympl shows how to use AppLayout
2. something I made awhile ago https://github.com/ianhi/AC295-final-project-JWI/blob/4f1831a0d9cc6228ef3b419ea77157a4ef9a229a/lib/labelling.py#L152
   • messy in parts but shows moderate complexity layout of ipywidgets + maptlotlib and linking them
     makes this:
     

OK, that is definitely one route. But it would include rewriting the GUI to some extent. I am sure that there are other "Jupyter-Apps" that will break when updating to matplotlib v3.3, so it would be nice to find out what is breaking it...

The other thing to note is that if you change %matplotlib notebook to %matplotlib ipympl your example works. and it will also work in jupyter lab not just notebook.

Ha, fantastic, thanks! I tried %matplotlib widget, but that didn't work.

Thanks. For me that is solved. Not sure if you want to keep the issue open though to track the problem down or not.

%matplotlib widget and %matplotlib ipympl are aliases for each other https://github.com/ipython/ipython/blob/f8c9ea7db42d9830f16318a4ceca0ac1c3688697/IPython/core/pylabtools.py#L14-L31 so either should work.

There are issues switching the backends, typically if you want to restart your kernel too.

My bad. %matplotlib widget does indeed work now, and I thought I did restart. But it might have interfered with all the other things I tried...

This is a duplicate of #18638, and will be fixed in 3.3.3.