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.

Ani-MADE-ed in Georgia - Bento Box Atlanta's The New Adventures of Paddle Pop

Welcome to Ani-MADE-ed in Georgia, where animation made in the US state of Georgia is discussed. 

So let's talk about probably the biggest studio in Atlanta currently, Bento Box Atlanta. They are a satellite studio of Bento Box from LA, which has made its mark in the previous decade with crafting hits for adult animation series such as Bob's Burgers, and Paradise PD. The studio set up its own animation division in Atlanta, whose main job is to provide animation services to shows that had pre-production done within LA's offices of Bento.

I like this idea of the studio to give steady work to suffering East Coast animators in a far location outside of the LA bubble, where consistent work can be tough to find. As well as doing the animation work of an American animated series entirely done stateside, which is a rare occurrence in this day and age. Most other work either goes overseas or to Canada, so I really appreciate Bento Box for forming and maintaining a stateside studio, especially in a new fledging city for animation such as Atlanta.

But the actual execution needs some major work. I'm appalled that Bento Atlanta pays their staff incredibly poorly for example, but that's one issue I'm not really qualified to talk about yet. But I will say support the new unionization efforts at Floyd Country Productions so that the Atlanta industry could improve as a whole: FCP Guild (@FCP_Guild) / Twitter

What I can talk about with certainty is that there is also a quality problem with the type of projects that come their way that I am not particularly thrilled about. It is hard on adult sitcoms such as Paradise PD, Hoops, and The Prince, for these Atlanta animators to really stand-out with their character animation on these types of adult series. It's not because the animators aren't talented enough, not at all. In fact, these series are very hard to pull off animation-wise, as simple as they may seem to be on first glance (Say hello to the endless amount of rules on Family Guy for instance). I can massively respect that. But it's not a pipeline where the animator can shine on their own terms or take advantage of the medium in a meaningful way. The character designs are locked heavily by the showrunners, and can almost never be anything other than on-model. These designs in general look extremely generic as well. Showrunners and executives on adult animation series constantly have this belief that "good animation or designs can get in the way of the writing", and it shows its head the most within Bento Box's series. As such, the Atlanta animators can never get the opportunity to truly shine with personality or character, instead taking the back seat to the showrunner's jokes being told with flat staging and characters mostly standing around with a minimal amount of character acting, instead of the art elevating the comedy as it should be.

I find this to be a waste on the animator's part because the Atlanta scene has so much potential for creativity, and most of that work in Bento's studio is just on visually bland adult sitcoms in the same lane as Family Guy.

But Bento Atlanta does have one notable exception where this is not the case. Released in 2017 and directed by Aaron Hawkins, The New Adventures of Paddle Pop is a 45 minute special that advertises the Paddle Pop mascot in a high-school setting. It is an unusual case of a project being outsourced to an American studio from an overseas client (Australia). It was made mostly in full by the Atlanta studio of Bento Box from storyboarding to compositing. It is not a great special by any stretch. The plot relies on the typical high-school tropes such as the battle of the bands and the mean girl rivals. But the character animation by itself is a breath of fresh air for the studio, as it is allowed to be fun and creative for once.

Unfortunately, it is hard to find an English version of this special anywhere, so I just watched it from a Thai dub found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XFJj8YU5Xo

There's a couple of characters that have good personalities come thru from the character animation, one of which is the Hairdresser Rabbit at the salon.

I fell in love with this character in the very short time he is in the special at the beginning. Thankfully, you can hear some of the English audio of this scene thanks to storyboarder Billie Liao posting his boards here: https://vimeo.com/243358997. It looks like he was voiced by Carlos Alazraqui. 

Stuff like the rabbit happily hopping over to the salon chair is really fun and show a lot of his character. You can get the sense that the rabbit loves his job as his passion. His traits of being a rabbit is also incorporated into the animation as he dainty hops over to the salon chair The animator even put a spin smear in to show that the rabbit has a bit of bravado also, making hare cutting into a show.

There is a feeling that the rabbit has had this job for quite a long time and so this is how he usually acts towards his customers. He is quite sociable, and loves everyone he meets and wants to get to know them better by wanting to engage them in a conversation.

Max the Lion said that he's getting a new hair-cut for a new school year. I like the rabbit's reaction. He loves to receive the information about his customers about this. You can tell that this situation is familiar to rabbit as he probably had to do haircuts of hundreds of people for the new school-year at this point in his career.

These rigs used in this production are probably not that great in terms of mobility and acting, so there is some frame-by-frame drawings used to supplement for the rigs' weaknesses, such as here. The animator drew in their own squash and stretch drawings of the rabbit (The squash down and the stretch up drawings in this shot above), probably to better accommodate Alazraqui's enthusiastic vocal performance with this dialogue. It really is some great character voice acting, the rabbit being extra excited of what  could be in store for him to tackle for this haircut. Also, I like that the animator incorporates more rabbit traits with that giddy mini-hop in those squash and stretch drawings.

Some funny gross-out reactions of the rabbit. It's well-timed. You can see the rabbit's hands smear offscreen between when he's sniffing the mane and his tongue sticking out, which is a nice detail. Something I also noticed is that the rabbit's ears exhibit some nice flowing overlapping action in this shot.

The lion twirling his mane hair is a clever way to allow for more unique animal acting.

I also enjoy the gag of the fly coming out of the lion's hair, it is something that would happen to a real-life lion. It fits the lion leaving his hair to be "natural", considering the human-like society of the animals.

Some more well-timed animation. More rabbit mini-hops are incorporated into the rabbit's expressions. I especially like that the rabbit's ears perk up when the rabbit vows to overcome the challenge of the hair.

More of that great squash and stretch drawings of the rabbit as he prepares to dive in to the challenge. The rabbit treats his hair-styling as an art, and it's cool to see a character in love with his passion like this.

More fun inventiveness with the rabbit hopping closer to the chair by hopping on those steps.

Business like the rabbit hopping from both sides of Max the Lion is executed well with the natural features of a rabbit while tying into his personality of him trying to reach out to Max to engage in the conversation more.

This is what I want to see more with Bento Box Atlanta in general, but the problem is that this type of animation just is not allowed to stand out within Bento's usual adult sitcoms and that is truly a shame that they are not able to stretch their wings any further. As this shows that the animators there contain a lot of untapped potential.