The most popular horse/human hybrid on Netflix is back with a second season — which dropped on July 17 if you’re looking for something to binge at the moment.
Will Arnett voices the titular Horseman, a Hollywood has-been struggling to regain some semblance of celebrity. This season, BoJack starts filming his starring role in a Secretariat biopic, while fighting off the demons from his past.
The whimsical world where humans and animals coexist (and often co-mingle) comes directly from the mind of production designer Lisa Hanawalt. It’s a world she’s drawn since she was a horse-obsessed little kid.
The new characters for season two come to life in the hands of Hanawalt and are molded through her own methods and imagination.
"I start by reading the scripts and then making notes on the characters that seem like the most fun to draw," Hanawalt says. "Then I leave all the side characters for last. I talk to Raphael [Bob-Waksberg], the creator, about what he envisioned for the characters. We've known each other a long time."
Hanawalt stopped by The Frame recently to talk about her process for designing characters, her past as a pet portrait artist, and gender in animation.
Interview Highlights:
You and creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg went to school together, right?
Yeah, we knew each other in high school. We were friends. He can be like, Do you remember that kid in our math class? Draw him — as a dog.
When you hear the title "production designer" on most live action work — TV or film — you think of somebody who is looking at costumes and who is looking at fabric, wallpaper, props. Does all of that detail involve the same level of execution on an animated show?
I think so. Just rather than looking at that stuff in person I'm looking at it on a Google image search and then drawing it.
It's also a very different medium from what you did growing up as an illustrator. So what are the fundamental similarities and fundamental differences between illustration and animation?
I think the main similarity is that here it starts with my reference points and my inspiration. I'm often drawing things from my parents' bookshelves in the background of the show. I want to make it personal and specific, so I'm drawing works of art that I really like and making parodies of them. I'm drawing fabrics that I'm drawn to. I'm looking at fashion blogs and choosing things that specifically appeal to me.
Then the main difference is that it is very collaborative. After I sketch out the characters and my ideas for things I want to be in the background, it's up to the animators to actually render it and make it work in animation because I don't have an animation background.
Well, yeah, they have to be able to move, they have to be able to do things, which is not something you have to worry about.
Yeah, they need teeth and mouth shapes, their arms needs to bend, which I realized when I was drawing too many patterns on the arms and legs. I was giving people a headache so I had to stop. I still do it sometimes though.
Can you talk a little bit about your education as an artist? What kinds of art you were drawn to as a student? What did you see yourself doing as an artist? How did that evolve over the course of your career?
I went to UCLA and studied studio art. I thought I was going to be a gallery painter, photographer or ceramicist. Then when I graduated that didn't happen immediately. I didn't suddenly get solo shows in Chelsea and I realized that is actually kind of difficult to break into. So I actually started doing a webcomic with Raphael and I started doing pet portraits for money. They're actually very similar to the animals in BoJack. They're wearing clothes, standing upright, and they didn't have tails.
Did that naturally lead to what you do now? Was that something that you were doing as a career or only to make ends meet at the time?
It was just something I enjoyed drawing at the time. I no longer enjoy drawing people's pets. I just want to draw what I want to draw and have people not tell me what to draw. But Raphael did use a lot of those pet portraits and animal-people drawings as inspiration for starting BoJack.
When a show is first launching there are certain kind of pressures and expectations — people you have to make happy. When you get to the second season you know that what you're doing is working. What does that enable you to do creatively in the second season that you might of held yourself back from doing in the first?
I think confidence is the main thing. I mean, when I started I was used to working all by myself. Then suddenly I'm telling a team of animators how to draw really basic things like clouds and trees. These are people who can draw better than me. So I'm like, I know you can draw this way better, but this is how to match my wonky style of illustration because that is the voice of the show. So now I feel a little bit less sheepish about doing that because I know it's not a complete flop. I'm not completely a fraud even though I'm still afraid I am.
We're doing more confident things with exploring the medium. There is one point in season 2 where the line art kind of breaks away and it's just water color illustrations that look like an old-timey story book. That was really fun to do.
Can you remember that first day when you were on the set or with your team of artists as an artist and an illustrator? You worked by yourself and now you're in a room. Do you remember the terror and panic you felt?
Yeah. I'm starting to have a panic attack just thinking about it. I mean, the supervising director, Mike Hollingsworth, is very good at talking to people and working with a large staff. So he kind of did most of the talking and then he was like, Well, Lisa, if you'd like to say a few words? I think I just mumbled something about liking complicated patterns and colors and then I wandered away. So I think it took a while for people to warm up to me, understandably.
How important is it to work with the actor who is performing the character? At what point, in the second season at least, do you start designing a character around a voice, or is it really always the reverse? That character is drawn and designed and then you find a voice that you think matches it? How involved in that process are you?
Everything is kind of done at the same time. Usually I've started designing a character by the time it's cast. Sometimes I haven't drawn anything yet. Sometimes Raphael will say, Oh, you know so-and-so is coming in today. Maybe if you have something you could show them? Then I'll kind of do a quickie just so I have something to talk to them about. I like meeting the actors.
Who are some of the new actors who we will be seeing in season 2?
Philip Baker Hall. He is really terrific in it. Lisa Kudrow plays BoJack's love interest this season and she is just amazing. She is an owl named Wanda. She might be my new favorite character. She has sort of a heart-shaped face. She's just very adorable.
How important is it on this show that you make sure that you are representing women in an interesting, positive, and meaningful way?
That is very important to me. I mean that is something I'm, of course, personally invested in. Yeah, I've had some battles over that.
Over what kinds of issues?
Well, there was one thing that Raphael blogged about so it became very public. There was a background gag where a car whooshes by and a dog slobbers on a person standing next to them because their tongue whizzes with the wind.
I wanted to make both those characters women and everyone disagreed with me. Everyone. It became this huge fight over several days and I kept pushing it. Normally I wouldn't, but it just seemed like I didn't receive one good reason why they couldn't be women.
What was the argument that they made for why it had to be men?
First it was just like, Well, we're worried it will be distracting because then the audience will wonder why there are two women. If it's a women and a man then it seems sexual. I was like, No that's insane. Women are funny. Women are gross. That's important to me to represent. Then I finally won.
The fear was that if it was two women it would mean something other than if it was two guys?
Yeah, because men are the base. When people think what is the most simple sort of human, it's a white man and anything else that is added to that complicates it for people. It comes with all kinds of meanings and connotations. If they have a different skin color, that comes with a connotation. If they're a woman, Oh well, what do I feel about that? Which is super weird because women are over half the population.
So yeah, I don't claim to be making great political strides just by drawing women into an animated TV show. I try to print out all the characters and put them up on my office wall so I can see how many people of different races we have and make sure that there is a little bit of balance there if possible. Raphael is also incredibly sensitive to that, even though he fought me on this one issue and then later admitted he was wrong. I mean we're constantly discussing it and we want to be called out if we get it wrong too.
If you were looking ahead to season 2, what would you say is evidence of your attention to that kind of detail in the upcoming season?
In season 2, BoJack goes on a series of dates. At first he's sort of trying to get something out of his head and a lot of the women he goes on dates with are like lizard people. But I wanted them to be sexy in this universe. Maybe in the world of BoJack, physical attraction is sort of different, beauty standards are different from our world because, why not? It's just more fun to have a sexy chameleon or a blue-tongued skink or whatever. I don't know how subversive that is, but it's fun for me.
Is there ever a moment where you say, I have co-created a show about an alcoholic-horse-former-actor that is on Netflix? Does it feel a little bizarre?
The thing that feels most bizarre is that it's come really full circle from me being an extremely obsessed horse girl in elementary school. I love horses, I think about them all the time, and now the fact that my job involves drawing horses and I've started to write again — I couldn't be happier about that.