Episode 40 - BoJack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2014-2020)

BoJack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2014-2020).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

With its last episode recently broadcast on Netflix, the web television series BoJack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2014-2020) provides a timely and topical subject for Episode 40. Join Chris and Alex as they take a canter through the programme’s status as ‘adult animation’ (and what this term might mean as a label); the dark truth of its themes of narcissism, depression and self-destructive behaviour; how its shifting chronology and narrative ellipses places BoJack Horseman within contemporary Hollywood ‘puzzle film’ storytelling traditions; its complex anthropomorphic register and cartoonal forms of representation; and how BoJack Horseman’s ensemble cast navigates modes of cross-species sexuality at the same time as it collectively disavows any presence of a concrete moral centre.

Suggested Readings

• David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1985).

• David Bordwell, “Film Futures,” SubStance 31, no 1 (2002): 88-104.

• Warren Buckland, Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

• Warren Buckland, Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014).

• Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

• Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, 13-41.