you would normally start setInterval/whatever function somewhere and you dispatch the change to re-frame when needed. Reframe will update the db and the components subscribing to that data will redraw when a change occurs. The component(s) themselves have no coupling whatsoever to what is providing the displayed data.

Maybe it'd be like Elm where you can subscribe to external events, as if you were to do something like this:

requestAnimationFrame(() => dispatch('TICK', Date.now() - prevTick))

Then you can feed the offset into view functions which forces a re-render and steps the animation.