The root htmlRoot option is extremely helpful, but doesn't seem to fix the loading issue across the board. I'm still seeing loading issues with subsequent animations on iOS, for example, that only my fix above takes care of completely.
Also, I didn't know about bScaleToParent. Was wondering why my animations stopped scaling properly, so this fixes that. Thanks!
I'll go ahead and mark your answer as correct, since I have things working properly now and there may be some other issue specific to my setup that's causing this.