Housebroken Animation Review ("Who's Wild?", 1BBHB04)

Some standout and interesting animation in this week's new episode of Housebroken, so let's take a look.

Episode 3/4 (Airdate order/production order respectively)

"Who's Wild"

Supervising Director: Mark Kirkland
Episode Direction: Jake Hollander
Retake Director: Corey Barnes

Consulting Director: Angelo Hatgistavrou

Supervising Animator: Gerardo Fuentes Jr.

Outsourcing Animation Studio: Synergy Animation (Shanghai, China)

In-House Retake Animators: Jun Baik, Ben Brownstein, Avery Depraect, Venetia Ellis, Matthew Incontri, Russell Jamison, Jose Juarez, Chris Stange

Now, Housebroken is one of these American adult animation series that relies on a samey formula for its visuals. The character designs and the animation aren't great (Very watered down designs by the Fox network, coming from legendary Simpsons director Mark Kirkland). It's a typical series that is run by writers who do not have much, if any, animation experience at all, and it shows. (Got the impression from reading all those Housebroken interviews from the showrunners).

But still, this doesn't mean that the artists can't do good stuff in the series. There's quite a good amount of solid animation moments in this episode. Most of which I suspect comes from the above-mentioned nine in-house retake animators, which is a very large number for what is otherwise an outsourced to Asia series. I think I can tell some of the time when in-house is animating a scene. Sometimes, it just switches in the middle of one shot from overseas to in-house, and other times, in-house tackles to animate the full entire shot. Bento's animators seem to mostly be working under a puppet system for their animation, while Synergy is working with hand-drawn animation. I don't work in animation myself, so don't take anything I speculate as absolute fact.

This shot of Elsa at the cold open of the episode is a very good example of a switch midscene.

Specifically, the switch happens at "Living up to my uniform", with Elsa stomping her little legs. There is a noticeable pop in Elsa's face drawing right before it happens.

Look at Elsa's face as it switches to a new drawing of her face even as her face doesn't even move in this part of the scene. And the new drawing of her face stays for the remainder of this scene. It's also at this point that the animation switches from being hand-drawn with an on-ones movement (Which is the norm for outsourced 2D Asian studios) to being puppeted from a rig timed on-twos as she starts patting her feet on the couch, which to me indicates that either the episode director or the retake director wanted a little more acting touches to this scene to sell Elsa's performance more. So the feet stomping was added in in retakes most likely.

Most of Honey's animation in the cold open also looks like retake animation as she's animated with puppet rigs such as this string of shots.

This series of shots is strongly animated. It does a good job of establishing that Honey is bored out of her mind and wants to hear about something new for a change.

First off, we get some good tongue action as Honey yawns. It's always a good thing to incorporate more animal-specific animation, such as the dog's tongue stretching out when the dog is yawning.

I like it whenever Honey's flappy ears have some nice subtle follow-through animation such as in these scenes. But it can be rather hit or miss throughout an episode whether or not her ears will have follow-thru animation in a shot, and the shots that don't feel more cheaper in my eyes.

The next shot is really good. Honey blinks her eyes very slowly, adding to a sort of groggy feeling of her becoming more tired from the boring speech.

To add to that, Honey lightly scratches her arm in the same slow manner, which is another nice addition to show that she's bored.

Her growing restlessness is quite well portrayed at the last shot with this bouncy nervous laughter animation.

The most striking portions of the episodes so far has been Honey's fantasy sequence of the rare coyote that she fawns over. This finally gives some room for animation as a medium to be taken advantage of in this series to great effect. Such as this sequence where Jake Hollander crafted this great scene where it is set in black night-time silhouette, and the canine body odor is a striking pink color that invites Honey to come over to the coyote.

Some daring shapeshifting effects too. I would love this series if it only was in the style of these fantasy sequences, but Fox wouldn't be happy about that.

The first bit of animation of the racoon looks like in-house animation also just from how snappy it is timed out. The racoon throwing the broom and the clippers has some good force and weight to the movement as as well, which you can't really say about the overseas animation. We've also got some good animation of the racoon's ears moving up and down depending on his expression, a nice animalistic detail.

The racoon is a fun one-shot character in his acting. This is a fun shot where the raccoon acts all territorial peranoid about definding his lot of garbage and he dives into the trash can and flips right back up. All fun stuff by this series's standards.

Next shot has some more fun acting as the racoon takes a step back in a frightened, and snappy fashion. His head shakes really subtly after he takes the step back, adding to how anxious he is about his space. Another nice detail I notice is the racoon's left arm twitching too, which really makes for a fun animal-listic behavior.

This Honey shot looks like a fully in-house shot to me because of the completely puppeted animation of her. Also note the great follow-thru movement of her ears.

This shot, the raccoon rejects Honey's offer so he tries to scare her off.

His fur frizzles when he tries to be threatening. 

The racoon makes a quick scuttle towards her.

And tries to scare her off again, furiously wiggling his tail upright to appear as a threat. Generally, the better parts of Housebroken's animation are almost always the scenes with the realistic animal behavior other than the more samey dime a dozen adult cartoon on-model acting scenes.