Armature bone unable to rotate while animation playing

I'm trying to have my non-humanoid character look at the player as the character is in a walking animation however my head doesn't want to rotate only when I'm playing my walking animation. I've created an avatar mask with the head bone unchecked and applied it to my animator base layer, however, the head still barely moves as compared to when there is no animation. I tried breaking the armature where the neck meets the head and it works exactly as I want it to. The only issue is some animations do need to animate the head. So i'd probably have to sync two animators or something which seems silly. So any thoughts on why my animator seems to affect my head regardless of the bone being unchecked? I even tried unchecking all bones and no luck. By the way, I'm modifying transform.rotation of the head bone to make it rotate.