The animacy advantage in memory refers to the robust finding that words representing animate beings are better remembered than words representing inanimate objects. The animacy effect is well explained in terms of its evolutionary functions, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms have remained elusive. The richness-of-encoding account implies that animate words stimulate participants to generate more ideas than inanimate words at encoding. These ideas may later still be available as retrieval cues that enhance recall. As yet, there is only correlational evidence associating the animacy advantage with rich encoding. If rich encoding causes the animacy advantage in memory, it should be possible to show that the animacy effect can be modulated by facilitating or suppressing rich encoding. In Experiment 1, we manipulated richness of encoding by asking participants to generate four ideas or one idea in response to animate and inanimate words. In Experiment 2, the one-idea-generation condition was compared to a condition in which participants generated an unrestricted number of ideas. In Experiment 3, the unrestricted-idea-generation condition was contrasted with a distractor-task condition in which idea generation was suppressed because participants solved math problems. Across all experiments, mnemonic benefits of animacy and rich encoding were replicated. However, none of the manipulations of richness of encoding modulated the animacy effect. These findings suggest that the animacy advantage in memory is not caused by richer encoding of animate in comparison to inanimate words.