[Interview] HouseBroken Director Eric Koenig Discusses His Journey In Animation 

When you look at his resume, it might seem like Eric Koenig had it all figured out a long time ago. But his journey in animation in Hollywood has been anything but linear. Starting out as a storyboard artist, Koenig worked on movies such as Cats Don’t Dance and Lilo And Stitch in the animation department. Koenig eventually found his way onto the team behind The Simpsons where he has become something of a jack-of-all-trades. Most recently, Koenig directed seven episodes of Fox’s animated comedy series, Housebroken. 

HouseBroken is the brainchild of Clea DuVall, Gabrielle Allan, and Jennifer Crittenden. The show revolves around a group of neurotic animals who rely on their therapy group to help resolve their wacky and outlandish issues. Housebroken features an impressive cast of actors such as Lisa Kudrow, Nat Faxon, Will Forte, Sharon Horgan, Sam Richardson, and Jason Mantzoukas. The cartoon debuted on Fox in 2021 and just recently wrapped up its second season. 

Where Eric Koenig Began His Animation Journey 

Koenig’s pathway to working on Housebroken began well before the first character on the show was ever drawn. Koenig has been a fan of animation for as long as he can remember. With a fascination for animation at an early age, Koenig looked to get a better understanding of the art form. 

“For one Christmas, my dad got me the famous book “The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation” by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson. And it’s really like the Bible to anybody that wants to pursue animation in any way. I started to kind of understand how animation worked by copying the drawings. There was a flipbook on the corner of the pages and I would flip through that and see how the animation worked.”

With a spark from studying the basics, Koenig then looked to the current generation of animators for guidance. 

“The Spike and Mike Film Festival was an animation film festival that would kind of travel around the country, and I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, and it was one of the places that they would come. And it was close enough to where the original Pixar was. And so there was one year that the Pixar animators all came to the film festival. I think I was 15 or 16, but I went up to them and started talking to them, and they were super passionate and they were really wonderful and explained what you needed to do to pursue a career in animation.

I was able to go to CSSSA, which is the California State Summer School for the Arts…it took place on the CalArts campus during the summer. And then I eventually got into CalArts later on. I got to befriend some people that were in animation. When I was growing up, if you were into comic books and animation, you were an outcast. It was a pretty isolating childhood, it was this kind of odd thing that you can’t share with anybody. So I was fortunate that I had a really wonderful group of people that I was in school with.”

Taking The Next Step In His Journey In Animation

After school, Koenig was able to find work relatively quickly. By 1997, he found himself working on an animated film. His journey in animation began with a bang. 

“I had kind of a strange path in animation. I started out right at the tail end of the second golden age of animation right when I got in there. And the first big movie I worked on is called Cats Don’t Dance. Then I went and worked on Prince of Egypt. There were lots of jobs and the whole industry was kind of booming. And I got my very first directing job. I was 25 and it was for directing Lady And The Tramp 2 at Disney.

But shortly after that, some of the big animated movies started to bomb. Those Disney toons were not as successful as they were hoping and the floor fell out of the animation business. For me, I had to stop and go back to square one, which meant going back to animating and storyboarding. Eventually, I landed on The Simpsons as an animator on the [The Simpsons Movie.] And then on The Simpsons, I got the opportunity to both animate, storyboard, and then eventually direct.

And I was directing a lot of the special projects. So I directed a number of commercials and even a World Series commercial. All sorts of odds and ends. So what came out of that was that I had to wear a lot of hats, especially in special projects. You have to do storyboarding and then I did a lot of the animation by myself. I learned how to do after-effects. I learned how to use Premiere and edit them myself.”

With a background in many aspects of the animation process, Koenig believes that it helped open the door to more opportunities. 

“It was a fun opportunity to become proficient in a lot of things. And then I have a wonderful friend, Mark Kirkland, who’s one of the directors on The Simpsons. He directed about 80 episodes on The Simpsons. And he was kind of near retiring and then got a call to become a supervisor and a producer on this show Housebroken. He reached out and it opened up the opportunity to go be a director on Housebroken season one.”

Housebroken Is Building A Solid Foundation 

With the second season of Housebroken officially in the books, Koenig sees the show coming into its own. He takes pride in the show’s limitless potential. Koenig says that despite the massive amount of talent on the show, the team works as a collective from top to bottom. 

“Jennifer Crittenden, Clea DuVall, and Gabby Allan are just wonderful people and they’re very open and generous. They create a whole atmosphere on the show that just everyone gets to feel like they’re a piece of. It’s very collaborative and in many ways, we’ve all become a family in the process of making the show. I feel like that comes through in the show. It’s a really fun thing to see as the show evolves. We’ve become more ambitious. And the characters become more dimensional. The stakes are getting higher and higher as the show has gone along.” 

Housebroken might be a fun animated show about talking animals, but that doesn’t mean Koenig and the rest of his team take their show lightly. The team behind the show developed a vision for the show that they thought would complement the show’s storyline.  

In the “Who’s The Cat-chelorette” episode, the B-story is a big kind of a spoof on Hollywood parties. It was very fun for us to come up with ideas about Nicole Richie’s house. She probably lives in Beverly Hills. So we went to Beverly Hills to photograph the area and create a home that would look like one of those Beverly Hills homes. We had a lot of fun using that as a launching pad.”

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due 

Without hesitation, Koenig is quick to give credit to the team around him. In his experience, he knows that animation is more than the work of just one person. 

“I want to give a big, giant shout-out to the art director, Hania Ansari, who was incredible. Hania just knocked it out of the park and is wonderful to work with and very collaborative and incredibly talented. There were two episodes in particular for me where we got to see her just strut her stuff. One was in “Who’s A Scaredy Cat?” which was kind of a horror episode earlier in the season.

We did this dark, moody take on LA and a lot of it takes place in the beautiful LA river, which has all of these Art Deco bridges. So we set it all in that area and the other part of the episode takes place down in this basement. We were thinking Big Trouble In Little China where you go under Chinatown and then there’s a sort of like kind of these caverns and underground passages. It was a lot of fun to kind of think of that.

And then we had all of these colors where the color supervisor, Jessie Seely, did these beautiful paintings and added all this wonderful color. Animation has this wonderful ability to find out what kind of things you want to do. The colorist will do what’s called the color script and you can get into a character arc. The mood can start by using grays and then as the character kind of goes on the adventure color comes into their life you can take each kind of sequence and use color to tell the story.

“I will always make sure to grab an early draft of the script about a month before the storyboard team starts. I go through it and do a scribble board of the entire episode. We work with the storyboard pro and I go in and break the script up into sequences and rough out the whole episode.” 

Reflecting on the opportunities that he has been given throughout his career, Koenig believes that his experiences allowed him to develop into a stronger animator. 

“There were mistakes that I needed to make when I was younger. I needed to go through a path to kind of learn from and I needed time to grow as a person. Film-making is an energy game. It is. It’s about how much energy you have. As an artist, I would say I’m now more knowledgeable than I was when I was 20, but I have to fight harder to maintain the energy and the perseverance and focus that I had when I was 20.”

Koenig On What Lies Ahead For Animation  

Throughout his career, Koenig has always managed to find time to be a fan of animation, even with his hectic schedule. What he admires most in animation are projects that push the boundaries from a cinematic and technical aspect. 

“Years ago a handful of us on The Simpsons all went to see a bunch of Miyazaki films at a film festival. Just seeing them on the big screen, we all left and it was just this mixture of being flabbergasted and in just awe. His films on both the storytelling and technical levels are just the mastery of animation. The last pair of movies that made me have that same kind of feeling were the Spider-Verse movies. I just left like “What the hell did I just see!?!” Like holy cow!

The technology of animation has opened up all sorts of venues. The Into The Spider-Verse films are movies where the acting is stellar and the art direction is stellar. The combination of the hand-drawn and computer animation with the pop art. I don’t think that you can fight technology. I think that animation had a big change 15 to 20 years ago From 2D animation to 3D animation. It was upsetting for lots of people that had to change and learn a new technology.”

As animation technology advances and new techniques are utilized, Koenig believes there is still one thing that technology can not replace. 

“As for AI in storytelling…I’m really skeptical because I feel like human beings know stories. A story is basically a human being telling another human being about all the terrible and stupid things that they did. That creates funny stories. I’m a little skeptical about a computer telling a human being about the stupid and funny things that it did.” 

Whether he’s animating, storyboarding, or directing, Koenig prides himself on being a student of animation. From studying the basics to immersing himself in the entire animation process, his journey through the animation world has been more than an illusion of life. His work proves that animation is full of life. 

Episodes of HouseBroken are available to stream on Hulu.