Review of BoJack Horseman (2014)

Seen in 2020.

There are Bronze and Iron Age graves where archaeologists have found babies buried with sippy cups. Even in the ancient world, the fanciest cups were decorated with cute animal motifs. From Silly Symphonies (1929) onwards, stereotypical English-language cartoon productions showed similar cute animals, infused with anthropomorphism. This is a potential source of comedy, mainly through incongruity and baseness. In the same way that viewers are expected to consider themselves superior to fools, they are expected to regard animals and animal people as inherently inferior. We laugh at those whom we believe to be so inferior. We call them silly. For more on this topic, read Steve Baker’s Picturing the Beast (1993).

Anthropomorphic animals make up about half the characters of BoJack Horseman, a sitcom-drama hybrid. The species are mostly what people in the USA had around them in barnyards and zoos before Henry Bergh and the ASPCA. The exceptions, such as a maggot mortician, are the same size. As an afterthought, the exceptions gradually expand to less famous species like a star-nosed mole in season 3. Moles are in the category of wild mammals, which constituted about 0.3% of animal biomass in 2018. The maggot mortician is an arthropod, a larger category in real life, but a smaller category on the show, used only for a one-scene joke. Thus the characters represent neither human society nor nature. Like a toddler’s picture book, or a Bronze-Age sippy cup, or Zoo City (2010), the show is not a picture of life.

There’s a horseshoe in the title card. BoJack, a horse, does not wear horseshoes. In season 1, the Rolling Stones play “Wild Horses”, a song that has no meaningful relationship with the themes of the show. Season 3 has a free-roaming herd of wild horses breaking BoJack’s despair, but he never goes to talk to them. Season 6 has a Puritan Christian “Horsey” religion in “Old Town Horseberg”, used to suggest that horses have some cultural or even ethnic identity from which BoJack has been estranged as a reason for and/or symptom of his emotional problems. All of these ideas are discarded as soon as they appear on screen.

Although there is no reason why the main character is a horse, the writers display a certain level of reflexivity about their use of animals in general. This reflexivity is below the ceiling of Family Guy (1999). The surname “Horseman” recalls Carl Barks shit like the domestic servants “Beakley” and “Duckworth” in DuckTales (1990), in addition to being a pun: A man who is a horse, not a rider. His non-human friends have stereotypical pet names and are not pets. At the high-water mark of reflexivity, in season 6, episode 3, a sports team has a “baby human” mascot nearly drinking poison in a pregame routine to indicate that the extended altriciality of real human babies has become a racist joke among fictional non-human people. This is in spite of the fact that some non-human babies on the show—notably Ruthie—are equally inept and slow-growing.

Non-human characters are sometimes used for physical comedy, as when a standing anthropomorphic hen lays an unfertilized egg in shock and the egg immediately hits the floor and cracks, without reaction. This is not fundamentally different from a bar fight in Pengar (1946) where a disturbed hen leaves an egg that hits a human character in the face. The humanity of the hen on BoJack is there to add an extra layer of deadpan incongruence. More often, the animals are used for visual variety and obnoxious advertising-style puns, like a bear holding up a sign that says “BoJack’s views are unbearable”. A whale works at “MSNBSea”. Lazy puns are used on non-animal topics too, as in the name “Dispirited” for an airline, alluding to Spirit with conspicuously minimal effort and no animal theme. It’s the wit of Howard the Duck (1986) without special effects. Fortunately, the word play becomes less about puns in the last couple of seasons and more about assonance.

Most people who make a show about silly animals, with puns in place of a fable’s symbolism, will avoid thinking about how it all works. For example, on Peppa Pig (2004), some animals are anthropomorphic and some are not. On BoJack, they are all anthropomorphic. To their credit, the writers of this show also thought about the food web. In season 1, episode 7, a cow waitress publicly pumps milk from her human breast to serve a customer. It’s wearisome to her, not like the joyful animism of “Goopy Geer” (1932). In season 2, episode 5, the writers go further and attempt the vertiginous nihilism of Rick and Morty (2013) by showing anthropomorphic chickens purposely brain-damaged from birth by the meat industry. They would otherwise have had human-level intelligence. Season 4, episode 11, implies fish are more crudely caught and killed en masse: “Those fish do not like being canned”, says a cannery worker. This is not the mere absurdity of a plum pudding complaining about being cut up in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Instead, it’s the callous grotesquerie of Nekojiru Gekijou (1999), with even stronger internal contradictions.

You can try to read the brain-damaged chicken episode as a metaphor for human-on-non-human relations in general, the contemporary meat industry in particular, or exploitative human-on-human relations. It is similar to the show’s recurring motif of wolves preying on sheep in public without reaction, and one boss hiring exterminators to kill unionizing roach workers in season 5, episode 2. Those allegories are in the style of single-panel political cartoons. I sense the creators were joking about their own thoughtlessness and apparent callousness, despite having the courage to bring up the food web in the first place. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is self-consistent on what would happen if animals were made anthropomorphic and sapient, but BoJack is not. It does not make sense as narrative and was not meant to. It is deliberately bad worldbuilding.

J. R. R. Tolkien gave a straight answer to the question “What if there were elves?” His sincerity cemented genre fantasy, ultimately pushing it into the cultural mainstream. Alan Moore, in his 1982 run of Marvelman, gave a straight answer to the question “What if there were supermen?” He took superheroes—a stale motif created for children—and remade them for adults through good worldbuilding. From Moore’s ingenuity and effort came decades and decades of superhero narratives that were more interesting and more successful than the schlock that had come before. It was the same again with Urobuchi Gen’s Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), which reinvigorated the magical girl children’s genre for adults by giving straight answers to the questions posed by that genre. The writers of BoJack do that with the food web, but they shun the follow-up questions because bad worldbuilding is consistent with the silliness that Steve Baker identified in typical depictions of animals. As in “Along Flirtation Walk” (1935) or Happy Feet (2006), the animals on this show are only intended to be funny, as they might have been to a Bronze-Age baby. The work doesn’t even rise to the level of Charlotte’s Web (1973) or the folktale logic and dark psychology of “Iguana Girl” (1992), a metaphor for post-partum psychosis and resentment of one’s own child using anthropomorphic animals.

In the Turkey City concept of the “Rembrandt comic book”, craftsmanship is wasted on too trivial an idea. Perhaps the creators of BoJack avoided good worldbuilding because they were afraid to produce a Rembrandt comic book. In this explanatory model, they felt that a show about animal people could never be intelligently rescued as by Tolkien, Moore or Urobuchi, but they certainly lavished their wit on the project all the same. Perhaps they were trying to produce a Rembrandt comic book, but ironically: A sitcom made funnier because of its obvious triviality. The real reason is probably simpler. Maybe BoJack was meant to be like Bone (1991), wherein Jeff Smith used Carl Barks with Tolkien’s epic mode, purposely adding more lightness than Tolkien did with his hobbits. I want to be charitable and say the creator of BoJack similarly went with animals as a counterpoint to their drama, but the counterpoint is inadequate. The dramatic writing on BoJack is much heavier than Bone. It is as heavy as Moore.

BoJack thus gets stuck imitating Fritz the Cat (1972), dumbly pointing to absurd details in children’s culture as it was manufactured 100 years earlier, long after subversion of that culture entered the mainstream and even though it isn’t relevant to the subject matter. The writers achieve irony when, in the second season, the horse camps it up on set instead of acting, because he’s nervous. That’s called coward camp. It’s appropriate here because the creator of the show similarly chose stereotypical anthropomorphism to tell his story about self-loathing and psychological toxicity, as if he was afraid that he could not succeed with sincere effort. I think the writers meant for all their work to seem potentially ironic in that way. They were too cowardly to frame the drama appropriately. They did not make their world self-consistent or follow logic as Tolkien, Moore and Urobuchi did in their respective genres, or as H. G. Wells did writing about Doctor Moreau, or as Hagio Moto did with her “Iguana Girl”. BoJack does not follow through. Its inconsistencies pile right up, as a gag.

The true model of this zany episodic comedy is Two and a Half Men (2003). Its main subject is celebrity. Todd Chavez is boring as its banana man. Vector animation enables all the usual drug-hallucination tricks to spice up the visual presentation. The drugs signify debauchery and depression among privileged, economically unthreatened men, as you would expect. At the centre of the drama, one such US man feels paradoxically hollow and mistreated, as in The Sopranos (1999) and Mad Men (2007). To their credit, the writers work to combine the heavy serialized tragedy (the death of Sarah Lynn) with the comedy, but most of the time, the kneejerk anti-idyllic satire just recalls Mad magazine.

Fans of the show, such as Ngofeen Mputubwele interviewing writer Shauna McGarry on The New Yorker Radio Hour (2021-12-14), praise the fact that actions on the show have consequences. That’s true, and it’s a good feature of any show, but only actions have consequences. Meanwhile, the world is left broken as a gag. It’s as if an idiot producer had decided that They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969) had to be a cartoon with talking horses, just in case the public would think the story was too dark. Fortunately, there’s a stylishness to the presentation that surpasses Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law (2000) and a spate of more outré post-South Park cartoons from the preceding age cohort. Will Arnett is good in the title role. Importantly, there are stand-out episodes where the writers challenge themselves to focus on something more interesting than show-business follies and hijinks. There’s a lot of talent in it, but its popularity and critical acclaim are a measure of alienation from both nature and the barnyard.

References here: March Comes in Like a Lion (2016), “Kanini & Kanino” (2018), Dorohedoro (2020), Tear Along the Dotted Line (2021), “Then Lost is Truth that Can’t be Won” (2022).

moving picture animation fiction series