Is there a way to efficiently animate the axis of a polar plot in matplotlib?

Question

I am trying to create a marine-style compass (fixed needle, rotating rose) using the polar plot of matplotlib.

# compass animated with matplotlib
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation as animation

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, polar=True)
ax.set_rmax(1)
ax.set_rticks([0.5, 1])
ax.set_theta_direction(-1)
ax.set_xticks(np.arange(np.radians(0), np.radians(360), np.radians(45))) 
ax.set_xticklabels(np.arange(0,360,45), fontsize='small')
line, = ax.plot([], [], lw=2)
ax.grid(True)

angle = 0

def init():
    line.set_data([], [])
    return line,

def animate(i):
    global angle
    angle += 0.1
    x = [0, np.cos(angle)]
    y = [0, np.sin(angle)]
    line.set_data([np.cos(angle),np.cos(angle)], [0, 1])
    ax.set_theta_offset(np.cos(angle)+np.pi/2)
    return [line]
anim = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, animate, init_func=init,
                               frames=100, interval=20, blit=False)
plt.show()

yields this:

as you can see I am using blit=False to make this work. But this also means it does not run smoothly together with the other plots.

Is there a way to make this work with blitting?