July 23rd, 2018 
Jackson Murphy 
There are conventional ways to get into the world of animated TV – and then there’s how Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano have done it. The two friends started in the advertising business, created a side hustle with a cartoon short, became film festival darlings and then caught the eye of Hollywood. The third season of Animals, their hit HBO series, debuts Friday August 3rd at 11:30pm ET.
Jackson Murphy: Why would you say you’re “disruptors” in the animation world?
Mike Luciano: One of the main things, probably, is that we didn’t necessarily come from an animation background. Obviously, we were fans of so many shows that we grew up with and those were the influences on us. But I think, maybe, if anything, we approached our show – which started from a series of shorts that we made a handful of years ago that Phil animated himself (and it was literally the two of us making the first handful of these shorts). I think by that nature of that “do it yourself” way that we stumbled into this show, it created its own aesthetic that we wound-up attaching to and really finding being the charm of what our now half-hour show is.
And I think from that, when we expanded into a full operation… to make full episodes… we sort of structured the whole thing around our little strange way of doing it. So, how we’ve made this show is kinda unique in that it stemed from ignorance.
JM: I happened to go to IMDB and look at your pictures. Mike, you have a very nice photo on the red carpet.
ML: Oh, thank you!
JM: Phil… you show-off the middle finger.
Phil Matarese: Oh yeah, bro! (laughs) It’s weird. It’s all weird… but your forward-facing persona… In Season 3, Mike and I are actually on-camera as our human selves. We have a lot more live-action this season. Every episode has a little bit in it. So I suppose I should re-think my forward-facing, live-action persona. But I don’t know. It’s a funny photo that I’ve always kind of liked.
I don’t know how I did it. I think my girlfriend actually did it for me. I had no idea how she was able to, but… Yeah, Man! Why the heck not, gang?!
ML: Amen!
JM: You guys voice the main characters on this show. But you also have SO MANY guest stars. This promo for Season 3 of “Animals” released on HBO’s YouTube has a list of about 40 people on it. How are you able to get all these people to come onto this show?
PM: I think the full count over the past 3 seasons has been something like 220 – around there. And it’s been all stripes of people. And… no joke: everyone’s been lovely to work with. And that’s probably not true overall in Holly-Weird. But for our show – for our experience – we’ve had a really good time.
Animation is very easy to do, as compared to a live-action set, where you show-up at 5am (sometimes), and you gotta do hair, makeup – all that sorta stuff. Animation is super quick. The way our show works is that it’s a lot of guest stars. It’s sort of an anthology show. People show-up for one episode, and we can bang that out in… on the long end 4 hours… on the short end 2 hours. They show up wearing whatever, and we got little baby carrots and humus made out for them. And we just have a good time in the booth.
So that, compounded with, I think now people maybe know that that’s the deal of our show. Early on, even before we hooked-up with HBO, our executive producer Mark Duplass was just reaching out to his friends and kind of laying the mat out. But now, it’s “Hey – can you spare 2 hours to do this fun, weird HBO show?”
JM: I’ve talked to a lot of animation people over the years, and rarely have I heard someone in animation say that it is easy to do.
ML: Easy for the actors. Let’s clarify that.
PM: We get to toil with their voices for the 9 months after they come in, so there is sweat on our part. But for them, they have a good time. You know what? We have a good time, too. Every part of the animation process is fun. But it, inherently, takes a while to do. Every spoon you see on screen goes through 5 iterations of rough to clean lines to color to be composited in there. So building these worlds takes a bit.
JM: One of your guest stars this season is Jacob Tremblay, the 11-year-old star of “Room” and “Wonder”. Correct me if I’m wrong: “Animals” isn’t aimed at 11-year-olds, right?
ML: No. I don’t think he should watch…
PM: Cool 11 year olds!
ML: Yeah, maybe!
PM: Jacob was an absolute dream to work with. I don’t want to say what he is yet. It’s a little bit confusing. But he’s an anthropomorphized thing. And he shows-up late in our Season Finale, and he’s really great. That was a really fun session that guy.
JM: There’s an article on the website Uproxx titled “The 9 Weirdest Characters on ‘Animals’”. Rarely do you find an article about a show that uses the word “weirdest” characters. Do you appreciate articles like that?
PM: I’ll take anything. I’ll take anything.
ML: I think it’s cool. I dig weird TV. I don’t like when people say, “Let’s get weird!” But I like the word as describing something because… when a website uses “weird”, it means it’s different and don’t quite know how to pin it. And I think that’s exactly what we’ve loved about this show from the beginning. It’s a show that doesn’t quite fit neatly into what maybe your preconceptions of an animated show are or tonally what… a late night HBO thing could be. I think having that quality to it gives us, in a lot of ways, the freedom to keep pushing ourselves to make the show as different as we wanna go with it – to take chances and keep playing with the form of it. And I think it keeps the people who love this show and really gravitate towards it – that’s exactly the quality that makes people love it – is its uniqueness.
JM: And from that 60-second teaser, it looks like this season is gonna be pretty violent. Would you say it’s the most violent, action-packed season of “Animals” yet?
PM: I don’t think there’s actually that much violence. It is definitely action-packed, so I think that lends itself to a really fun, big trailer. But Season 1 had a mayor storyline. That’s really violent. I think this season is definitely a more serialized 10 episodes, which we’re really excited about – really excited for people to see and pick-up all the little pieces of it because… the way our production worked, we just worked in a non-sequential way. So it’s gonna be really fun to have the population sit down and watch it 1-10 and pick-up on everything we’ve dropped.
It’s a fun season. I think it’s our best season. And it really hits the stride of what people liked about “Animals” in the beginning – is that it’s this conversational, loose, improvised feeling, silly show that you can kind of relax and laugh with… but also have really nice stories on an episodic level and also on a larger level that have heart to them and have a nice message underneath it all.
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