For Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano, early October is bittersweet. On the one hand, the HBO show they co-created, produce, write, and star in—Animals—typically wraps up its season around then each year, as its third season will on Friday, October 5, with “Roachella.” On the other hand, they’ve been eager to see this finale air for months.
“It’s a great, fun, silly concert send-off for this season,” Matarese told The Dot and Line when he and Luciano caught up with us over the phone this week. He also rattled off a dizzying list of performers contributing their talents to the episode: David Harbour, Edie Falco, Dinosaur Jr, Akwafina, Donna Lewis, and more guest stars will add their names to the show’s already massive IMDB credits list.
Luciano and Matarese, whose original web videos were picked up by the Duplass brothers and developed into the post-apocalyptic anthropomorphic cartoon comedy we know today, take the work in good humor. “Phil and I can’t really sit still for very long. We are taking medication for that,” Luciano joked. They answered a few questions for us ahead of the season finale about Animals and specifically on the episode “The Trial”—an extended repartée between their characters Mike and Phil (who are rats) examining the debate that defines a comedy generation: Jim Carrey vs. Adam Sandler.
The Dot and Line: So, on the record, are you renewed for another season? What can you say?
Phil Matarese: As for Season 4, Mike and I have great, awesome, amazing creative plans for it and for the future of the show. We would absolutely love to do it. We’re all just waiting. We waited a long time last year, so we’re waiting a little bit this year. It’s a good time for Mike and me to collect our thoughts on the potential upcoming season and on other stuff as well. It’s cool. The seasons are changing, our lives are changing. It’s great.
The Dot and Line: Walk me through your process from start to finish of making just one episode of Animals.
Matarese: Yeah. You want to take it, [Mike]? We could pass off.
Luciano: Basically, Phil and I will lock ourselves in a room. We’re the only two writers. So we’ll write the episodes, and what our scripts look like are basically 20 to 22 pages or so of what’s kind of a bolstered outline. We record our scenes when we cast the episode. We are in the same room with the people who do the voices, and we improvise off of the scripts that we create. So there’s not a scripture, but there are plenty of jokes throughout it that we write. We’ll basically take all that audio and edit that down into a radio play. And then from there we’ll marry that with storyboards and create a full episode animatic with music and really begin to feel out what the episode’s going to be in a nascent stage.
While that’s happening, all of our character designs, backgrounds, all that stuff is being developed. And then we basically get to the point where we marry those final images to that. We hone the edit. And we pump out an episode. The whole process takes probably something around eight to nine months for an episode. And, you know, waiting.
Matarese: But it’s eight to nine months for all 10 of the episodes [in a season]. I don’t know if it’d take eight to nine months if we just did one.
Luciano: The whole thing’s about 10 months for the season. We stagger episodes along the way.
“The backgrounds were photorealistic because it was easier to steal, you know, subway images and step on them in Photoshop and then draw some shitty lines over it , rather than just completely drawing the entire subway scene.”
The Dot and Line: I really like the look and feel of the show. How did you guys decide on the show’s art style and aesthetic?
Matarese: It all stems from the DNA of the shorts, the animated shorts that we did on the Internet. I was drawing in Adobe Illustrator, which is more of a graphic design vector–based program. I’m not a good illustrator at all with pen and paper, but I liked Adobe Illustrator because it’s more malleable. You can pinpoint any line and keep adjusting it. It’s not like you’re in Photoshop, which is closer to pen and paper and where you have to erase lines and stuff. I like the idea of building it like it’s Legos or something like that almost. Long story short, it stems from that kind of style.
The backgrounds were photorealistic because it was easier to steal, you know, subway images and step on them in Photoshop and then draw some shitty lines over it, rather than just completely drawing the entire subway scene. So there’s all these weird sort of picking and choosing, and working with your inabilities, but then exploiting those inabilities and making them your quote-unquote style of art. It all came from there.
Eventually, we partnered with Starburns, where we’re currently at, andwhere we made the main seasons of the show. They’re the main pipeline for having, like, 50 different people working on the show, which influenced the art style too. And it’s evolved over the series to be a little bit cleaner.
The Dot and Line: What has it been like to transition into doing more live-action acting on the show this season?
Luciano: We’ve always messed around with live-action film, and both come from live-action, making shorts and music videos. We worked at a production house that made a bunch of short-form content stuff that was all live-action. That was always a fun thing since the beginning of Animals, to toy with injecting live-action inside our animated show. In the second season, we decided to do a fully live-action episode that we did with RuPaul and Judy Greer and a bunch of other great people.
This season, we were writing it and this little storyline came about. We’ve always had storylines being told tangentially to the animals. And we thought, Well, why don’t we really blow it out this season? So we tried doing something where we could kind of develop another Phil and Mike dynamic, but do it live-action.
The Dot and Line: And you got to work with Demi Moore! Do you have a favorite guest star? You guys have worked with a ton of people on the show at this point. Are there any fun stories to share?
Matarese: Friday’s [season finale] episode has a really nice, funny, weird dynamic between David Harbour and Edie Falco that I like. Mike just so happened to be in New York City at the perfect time. [Mike,] you were there for like three days or something. It was just like this weird Friday where she was in town and David Harbour had just flown in from Bulgaria, where he was doing Hellboy, and I was Skyping into the session. They’re like a couple. He’s a flamingo, and she’s a wolf. So it’s already really weird and bizarre, but it was one of our later ones this season. It’s just a nice, funny, free-flowing thing. She’s such a great actor and has such a good, distinctive voice. And he was just bonkers creepy—I think he was pretty jet-lagged from coming from Bulgaria—but he was so funny and so big. For me to watch that on an iPad and also see Mike there was very odd and cool. I was quiet and sometimes saying things, but for the most part I was just watching Mike do something really cool.
Luciano: Like The Truman Show.
“Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler…Which one is better? Like, if you had to choose. And then it became the definition of ‘better’ — what does that even mean? It ended up being a really great way for us to tell a character story.”
The Dot and Line: What’s the origin story of your Adam Sandler vs. Jim Carrey debate episode this season?
Luciano: Phil and I were writing over the summer… Somehow it came about where we were talking about the careers of Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler and their trajectories. They’re obviously both huge, storied careers, and not really in a comparable way, and we just began to have a lot of fun going: Which one is better? Like, if you had to choose. And then it became the definition of “better”—what does that even mean? And then it just became this thing of, What if we literally dove in and fully dissected their careers? And made it about, you know, the persuasiveness of a lawyer-y trial storyline and tropes, and how could we apply it to the silly concept?
It ended up being a really great way for us to tell a character story for Phil Rat as this earnest lawyer who has his heart really in it and Mike Rat who’s really just playing the game of the lawyer. You’re sort of not sure if he believes it or not and riding that out. [Laughs.] It became a really fun way for us to hit that seventh-episode watermark in the season.
Matarese: I think the best episodes of Animals are when Mike and I are just talking and acting the most. I remember the both of us just standing up and stalking around and just playing those roles and actually, truly having that conversation. I remember “Flies,” which is another seventh episode from Season 1. Another let’s really do a drama send-up, and standing up and talking it out, too. If we can verbalize it, and it feels like there’s so much more to be said, that’s a really good thing for our show’s DNA. But just back to “The Trial,” I think it was truly an argument we had—a true conversation that ended up delving into this crazy thing.
The Dot and Line: Do you know if Sandler or Carrey know about the episode?
Matarese: Probably not, but I don’t know.
The Dot and Line: I hope they just find it completely randomly, late at night or something.
Matarese: Maybe Sandler’s kids? I don’t know how old they are, but if they’re like 14, 15, 16, they’re going to come across it. They’ll show Dad.
Luciano: It’s a love letter to both.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Thanks for reading The Dot and Line, where we talk about animation of all kinds. Don’t forget to for this article and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
