Adult animation has typically been a boy’s club. Family Guy is notorious for its treatment of gender, race and sexuality that alienates pretty much everyone who isn’t a straight white guy. Then there’s South Park, Rick and Morty, Archer, and American Dad – all of which typify the genre’s long-standing bro-centric focus.
At first glance, BoJack Horseman – the final season of which just landed on Netflix – could be easily mistaken for more of the same. The titular character is hardly a paragon of male wokeness. He’s brash and boorish, he makes sexist remarks, he doesn’t value the women close to him, he shuns dating women his own age. Generally as a result of his own emotional stuntedness, he also repeatedly hurts the women around him.
But the show is actually a surprising blast of fresh air. The delightfully surreal universe, populated by a happily cohabiting assortment of animal-human hybrids, is one where the patriarchy still exists, but is exposed, confronted and undermined by a collection of complex, well-written female characters. Consequently, it features some of the most sensitive handling of gender-related issues anywhere on TV right now.
BoJack differs from the wilfully dumb or morally reprehensible male protagonists – from Homer Simpson to Rick Sanchez – frequently seen in animation. Yes, his crassness and selfishness are vehicles for humour, but his offensiveness is not an end in itself. Instead, his personality is a way of looking at his past – most notably his emotionally abusive and neglectful upbringing – his mental health and addiction problems, and his behaviour towards those around him. As creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg described it, he’s a character who’s “had every opportunity imaginable, but still can't find a way to be happy”.
But a well-rounded male character does not make BoJack a feminist show – far more important is its portrayal of strong, coherent female characters. How has the show succeeded where so many others have failed? The answer is simple: involving more women in the creation process. The show’s creator is Raphael Bob-Waksberg, but the genesis of the project was a collaboration with his close friend Lisa Hanawalt, the cartoonist whose imagined human-animal hybrid universe predated the show.
Bob-Waksberg has acknowledged Hanawalt’s role in pushing him to consider the gender implications of the series from the start. In 2015, he described in how Hanawalt forced him to reconsider the ‘male default’ problem that plagues animation and TV in general, by drawing characters with unspecified gender characteristics as female. The fact that Bob-Waksberg sometimes found this jarring, prompted him to reconsider his own assumptions.
The series has included female writers and directors from the beginning, but this has become more balanced over time. In the first season, three out of the 12 episodes were directed by a woman (Amy Winfrey) and three had female writers (Caroline Williams, Laura Gutin Peterson, Kate Purdey). By the fifth season, 50 per cent of the directing and 50 per cent of the writing was done by women.
“Simply having female writers or animators present in the room doesn't undo the pressure to conform to majority rule,” says Stacy Bias, a freelance animator. “But when female voices are truly respected and their input is valued, that inevitably becomes clear in terms of character development, narrative and plot. Women unflatten.”
On BoJack Horseman, these unflattened female characters come to the fore. In the most recent season, there were a number of standalone episodes foregrounding female characters. 'The Dog Days Are Over' follows Diane, BoJack’s closest friend, on a post-break-up trip to Vietnam where she intends to connect with her ancestry but ends up feeling even more alienated. 'The Amelia Earhart Story', meanwhile, is told through the imagined granddaughter of Princess Carolyn, BoJack’s agent, following the impact her unplanned pregnancy would have on her.
The show provides plenty of commentary on how sexism is experienced by the female characters. The BoJack Horseman universe might be a baffling menagerie of inter-species blends, but the gender binary still very much exists. The female characters are forced to contend with sexism at numerous points, but one of the most poignant storylines about the scars of patriarchy concerns BoJack’s cold and emotionally abusive mother, Beatrice.
In a series of flashbacks at the end of season four, we see Beatrice’s childhood unfold. We discover that when her brother died during the Second World War Beatrice’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown. In the face of her husband’s cool imperviousness and embarrassment about her “womanly emotions”, she becomes ‘hysterical’ and is eventually treated with a lobotomy. Beatrice, scarred by her upbringing and her own narrow options, raises BoJack poorly, who in turn goes on to unthinkingly perpetuate the same sexism that had such devastating effect on his family history.
While not many attempt to tackle themes as dark as BoJack Horseman, some adult animation does attempt to take on topics like gender and sexism. Freelance animator Bias mentions watching a recent episode of South Park, where Cartman gets a girlfriend who he ignores and gaslights. “While it was clearly intended to be ironic and to highlight how much of an ass Cartman is, it failed because his girlfriend – whose name I tellingly can't recall – was ultimately only there as a flat object against which to reflect Cartman's misogyny,” says Bias. “Her experience was not explored. And the absence of representing the true, resonant impact on a whole, dynamic being felt like implied forgiveness – which ultimately it is.”
This highlights the complexity of handling topics like these in a way that doesn’t end up just shrugging it off. Can a reprehensible character be peeled from the moral architecture of the show in which they appear? Can you have a sexist protagonist without it becoming a sexist show? These are quandaries Bob-Waksberg has talked about navigating on the making of BoJack Horseman.
“I think you have to be very careful with those kind of jokes. That you are clear on who you're satirising and what you're satirising,” he told Vice. “I'm sure you've seen this: there's a lot of comedy from male comedians doing sexist "jokes" where the comedy is: "look how sexist I'm being" but they're also just telling a sexist joke, you know what I mean? Like they're having their cake and eating it too.”
“But it can be tricky when you're heading into that territory. Not celebrating the sexism, not endorsing it or making it fun or cool or funny, but actually the opposite,” he continued. He’s commented on the efforts the show’s producers now go to to avoid glamorising BoJack’s less desirable character traits. It’s for similar reasons he’s publicly stepped back from some of the humour deployed in earlier seasons, which was less sensitively handled.
Layers of irony can muddy the waters. It’s a defence employed for shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: that these characters are supposed to be despicable. You’re not supposed to identify with them. But isn’t laughing at a racist joke – even in the mouth of someone we’re supposed to know is a deplorable character – still laughing at a racist joke?
And these antiquated stereotypes have far-reaching consequences. This might explain why these jokes sour in the mouths of those at the wrong end of discrimination, even if the characters espousing them are absolutely not intended to be role models.
This predicament weaved its way into BoJack Horseman’s most recent series, in which BoJack finally takes a break from scuppering every professional opportunity available to him to star in a gritty anti-hero detective series. But the show ends up glamorising the same toxic masculinity it’s claiming to ‘deconstruct,’ and efforts to make it “less sexist” end up making the character more relatable, and making audiences more sympathetic to his actions.
It’s a problem that BoJack Horseman’s creators have had to tussle with too. But with a lineup of deeply studied female characters to relentlessly critique his behaviour and hold him to account, it's not just BoJack that learns to challenge his behaviours, but audiences too.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
