jsPlumb offers an animate function, which wraps the underlying animation engine for whichever library you happen to be using, and inserts a callback for jsPlumb to repaint whatever it needs to at each step. You could of course do this yourself; it's a convenience method really.
The method signature is:
jsPlumb.animate : function(el, properties, options)
The arguments are as follows: - el - element id, or element object from the library you're using. - properties - properties for the animation, such as duration etc. - options - options for the animation, such as callbacks etc.
jQuery offers a revert option that you can use to instruct it to revert a drag under some condition. This is rendered in the UI as an animation that returns the drag object from its current location to wherever it started out. It's a nice feature.
Unfortunately, the animation that runs the revert does not offer any lifecycle callback methods - no 'step', no 'complete', etc - so its not possible for jsPlumb to know that the revert animation is taking place.
The adapter used by vanilla jsPlumb (from 1.6.0 onwards) supports only left and top properties in the animate method.