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. The mortician is used only for a one-scene joke. Thus the characters represent neither human society nor nature. Like a Bronze-Age sippy cup, or a modern toddler’s picture book, or Zoo City (2010), the show is a picture of convention, not life.

Anthropomorphism is used for physical comedy, as when a shocked hen, standing on human legs, lays an unfertilized egg. 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 one extra layer of deadpan incongruence. More often, the animals are used for visual variety and obnoxious puns, like a bear holding up a sign that says “BoJack’s views are unbearable”. Other puns, like “Dispirited” for Spirit Airlines, have no animal theme and no more appeal. It’s the wit of Howard the Duck (1986) without the special effects. Fortunately, the word play becomes more about assonance in the last couple of seasons. Unfortunately, even that change for the better was apparently intended mainly to irritate; specifically to irritate Amy Sedaris, one of the better actors. She said she disliked tongue twisters, so she had to do more of them.

When people make a show about silly animals and put puns in place of a fable’s symbolism, they usually don’t think about the world. For example, on Peppa Pig (2004), some animals are anthropomorphic and some are not. On BoJack, they are all anthropomorphic. That self-consistency is a good thing. It’s funny, but not just silly. It avoids a specific logical inconsistency. To their credit, the writers of this show did not stop there. They 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). It’s not internally consistent worldbuilding, but it shows ambition.

The brain-damaged chickens are not crudely literal, but their meaning is vague. You can read them as a metaphor for human-on-non-human relations in general, for the contemporary meat industry in particular, or for exploitative human-on-human relations. Compare 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 other allegories are in the style of single-panel political cartoons. With the chickens, 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. Somewhere along the way, they gave up on the idea.

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 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. In their bold treatment of the food web, the writers ask “What if animals were anthropomorphic?” They begin to answer, but they shun the follow-up questions and retreat. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is self-consistent on what would happen if animals were made anthropomorphic and sapient, but BoJack did not take that opportunity.

In the second season, the horse camps it up on set instead of acting, because he’s nervous. That’s called coward camp. The show’s creator similarly chose stereotypical anthropomorphism to tell his story about self-loathing and psychological toxicity. I suppose he was afraid that he could not succeed with sincerity as Tolkien, Moore and Urobuchi did. Worldbuilding would not be the comfortably familiar silliness that Steve Baker identified in mainstream representations of animals. At the same time, I think 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 went with “funny animals” as a counterpoint to drama, but the counterpoint is inadequate. The dramatic writing on BoJack is much heavier than Bone. It is as heavy as Moore. 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.

The combination doesn’t rise to the level of Charlotte’s Web (1973) or the folktale logic and dark psychology of “Iguana Girl” (1992). The latter is a metaphor for post-partum psychosis and resentment of one’s own child using anthropomorphic animals. The figure of the iguana represents an unwanted coldness, but there’s no such symbolism here. There’s a horseshoe in the title card, but BoJack 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 ethnic identity from which BoJack has been estranged, but there’s no worldbuilding there either. All of these ideas about horses are discarded as soon as they appear on screen. No point is allowed to develop.

It is the same with reflexivity. The surname “Horseman” recalls Barks’s nomenclature, two examples of which are “Beakley” and “Duckworth” in DuckTales (1990). “Horseman” is also a second kind of pun: An addict who has tried heroin (horse) and is a horse, not a rider. His non-human friends have stereotypical pet names and are not pets, but the writers don’t reflect on that as part of the show. 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. The gag is that the extended altriciality of real human babies has become a racist joke against all human races. Non-human babies on the show, notably Ruthie, grow like human babies.

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 its world is left broken by the absence of consequences. 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. Vector animation enables all the usual drug-hallucination tricks to spice up the visual presentation. 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 the main subject. There’s talent in it, but its popularity and critical acclaim are a measure of alienation from both nature and the barnyard.

If you just ignore the animals, you find that the true model of this comedy is Two and a Half Men (2003). Its main subject is celebrity, not trauma or animals. Todd Chavez is boring as its banana man. The drugs signify debauchery and depression among unfairly privileged, economically unthreatened men. At the centre of the drama, one such US man feels paradoxically hollow and mistreated because that was the central motif of both The Sopranos (1999) and Mad Men (2007), repeated in a slew of lesser shows like BoJack. The writers are out of their depth trying to combine the heavy serialized tragedy (the death of Sarah Lynn) with a comedy about show-business follies. The result, a kneejerk anti-idyllic satire, reminds me of Mad magazine. Its inconsistencies are left to pile up, dumbly subverting the same old children’s culture as Fritz the Cat (1972). In that respect, BoJack beat a dead horse.

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