What could make an animation curve incompatible with a generic avatar?

I’m on Unity 5.4.1f1. I have a character that uses a generic avatar and a variety of imported animations that are set up in its animator controller. This works.

I want to add an animation state that uses an animation clip instead of an imported animation. I can create the clip and assign it to the animator. When I try to edit the clip in the Animation window via dopesheet, I can add keyframes, but I can’t edit them–they’re pinned to the starting values as set in the object’s inspector. I can edit the curves, but the correct keyframes aren’t reflected in the dopesheet and the values don’t change while playing.

If I remove the avatar assigned to the Animator, I can edit the clip via dopesheet normally. If I reassign the avatar after editing the clip, the keyframes just snap back to the default values for everything and nothing animates.

What’s going on here?

It turns out that the animator component has to be on the game object transform that matches the fbx rig root. I had moved it up one for convenience and the fbx’s imported animations worked fine (via some unity automapping mechanism), but animation clips do not accept this.

Ideally