The Hand of the Artist: Bojack Horseman and Deconstructive Animation

Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908).

In the earliest forms of animation, the so-called ‘Hand of the Artist’ was a visual tool to represent the moment before a drawing came to life on its own. Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) is a famous example of this, where the hand and the pencil of the animator disappear once the drawings begin to seemingly move autonomously. Over the century since Fantasmagorie, animation has returned to this visual device as a form of satire or as a metatextual exploration of the medium, to disrupt our perception of the constructed reality of animation in a manner unique to a medium free from the constraints of live-action. Paul Wells argues that “animation’s inherently rhetorical condition means that its construction is always a critical intervention and interrogation of the representation of the material world” (Wells 2019, 15) which is what allows animation to be utilised as a reflexive storytelling device through the deconstruction of its own medium. This concept applies directly to one sequence from the critically acclaimed Netflix series Bojack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2014-2020), specifically Season 1, Episode 11 “Downer Ending”, where the eponymous Bojack Horseman embarks on a drug-fuelled bender in an attempt to finish his memoir that is due within a matter of days. Towards the end of his trip, he experiences an existential crisis and finds himself quickly reversing backwards through the process of animation until he resides still as a drawing on crumpled paper swiftly erased by his maker. In this blog, I argue that this clip harks back to the origins of animation and the spectacle of movement, drawing comparisons with the “hand of the artist” trope and how its use here ties the series to a legacy of animation examining its own medium. I will then expound – by analysing multiple specific frames – exactly what each stage of deconstruction is referencing, and the meaning behind this stripping down of the animation.

Season 1, Episode 11 “Downer Ending” of Bojack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2014-2020).

The hand of the artist is the embodiment of Eric Patrick’s belief that “the very nature of animation is to foreground its process and artifice,”: it acts as a visual tool to announce to the audience that what is being depicted is a fabrication drawn literally from the subjective gaze of the animator’s reality (2014, 38).  While its origins are unclear, the term possibly originates from Walter R. Booth’s 1906 film The Hand of the Artist that incorporates elements of stop-motion and has been claimed to be the first British animated cartoon. However, this status has been disputed by Donald Crafton who does not consider ‘stop-action’ as it was known then, to fall into this category (1993, 25). I believe that this clip from Bojack Horseman is a perfect example of what Wells would describe as ‘deconstructive animation’, one of seven genres of animated film (2002, 26). It is within this genre of deconstruction that the hand of the artist can enter the medium as the element of live-action ‘reality’ encroaching on – and often controlling – the fabricated animated world of their creation.

Fig. 1 - The hand of the artist erases a sketch of Bojack from existence.

In the sequence, Bojack panics in the scene because, crucially, he is aware of his situation and aware of his existence as a cartoon. Not only is the show referencing its own medium, but its main character is directly interacting with it. This trope, where the animated character interacts with the animator, is present throughout animation history. It is perhaps most famously seen in Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck (1953), a Looney Tunes short starring Daffy Duck in which he fights with an unseen meddling animator (later revealed as Bugs Bunny) who changes both Daffy’s physical appearance as well as the environment of the world around him. While Bojack does not react to the hand of the artist as Daffy does in Duck Amuck, his paranoid reaction implies he is aware of his inability to control what happens next and stop his impending erasure. The scene undoes the process of animation by reversing it so far backward that we return to a sketchbook state of pencil and paper, where the figure can no longer move, and the drawing is no longer animated.

The irony of this scene is that Bojack Horseman is not a hand-drawn animated series, it is computer-animated. In this case, the hand of the artist is not a literal creator, but rather occupies the metaphorical role of the creator, like a stand-in for God imbued with the power to give life and take it away. Bojack sees himself as a mistake that shouldn’t exist, and this scene communicates his self-destructive state-of-mind by having a pencil literally erase him from the picture (Fig. 1). In fact, the pencil itself is not a real pencil, nor is the paper real paper; it is a digitally animated recreation of the process of physically animating something. In this moment, the animators of Bojack Horseman bridge the gap between the start and end of a century of animation, drawing a direct link from traditional hand-drawn styles to the dominant computer-animation of today.

I will now more closely analyse the clip by picking out three particular frames of interest to my argument that the sequence is deconstructing animation, focusing more specifically here on how these images dissect the animated body and examine its relation to the visual language of the series. Bojack Horseman often uses its own medium as a storytelling device. The show exists in the space between realism and surrealism, oscillating between serious adult storytelling and wacky plots, despite taking place within the exact kind of colourful anthropomorphic world which has so often been tied to children’s cartoons. Animation is exactly what allows this anarchic mix of tones to work, and the show is very aware of this, often utilising the animated space of its fictional world as a blank canvas to be filled with everything from exaggerated physics to visual gags and background jokes. The reality the show inhabits is a construct created by Bob-Waksberg, his fellow writers, and the animators working on the show, and is designed to be a funhouse mirror of our own that includes our darkest and cruelest reflections. If – as Wells believes – the animator is involved in “every aspect of what is a highly detailed process of creating a world rather than merely inhabiting one” (2002, 26), then the process of recreating the world as that person sees it can be viewed as an inherently subjective perspective on our own reality.

Fig. 2 - Bojack running as he is drained of colour.

This is all to say that this clip is just one example of how the series regularly engages with its visual language, in this case to represent what would be unrepresentable in live-action. When the clip begins, Bojack – appearing as he does throughout the series – finds himself as a ‘drawing’ on a crumpled piece of paper. Already, the moment instantly references the traditional hand-drawn paper-based origins of 2D animation, tying Bojack and the show specifically to the original ‘purest’ form of the art. As he begins running forwards he quickly devolves into a more abstract form and later into a simple unmoving sketch.

As depicted in Figure 2, Bojack begins running, is first stripped of his outlines, and then drained of colour. At this stage he retains ‘realistic’ features but loses depth and reverts to a more simplistic design. In Figure 3, only a second later, Bojack is reduced to a form made up of abstract shapes resembling the type of wooden manikin used by artists to sketch the body. This echoes Fantasmagorie where simple geometric shapes like squares and circles form the characters, retaining enough similarity to detailed human shapes that the viewer can understand what they are representing (Al-Ali, 2019).

Fig. 3 - Bojack becomes more abstract.

Finally, in Figure 4, Bojack becomes a rough stick-figure drawing with only a small suggestion of his anthropomorphic physical properties as a horse in the rounded triangle attached to his circular head. Additionally, he has stopped moving; he has lost bodily autonomy and has become one frame devoid of movement – a drawing that is no longer animated. It is at this point that the pencil enters the frame to erase him; he has reverted to the earliest state of animation before he comes to life.  In his analysis of Duck Amuck, Alex Evans writes that the film dramatises “the often-threatening relationship between the body and its environment” (2017, 378) which is not dissimilar to what Bojack Horseman does in this clip. Evans concludes that Daffy Duck becomes the “modernist archetype” of “the isolated individual who attempts in desperation to adapt to a constantly changing environment, during which process his body becomes increasingly mutable and, eventually, disposable” (ibid.). Similarly, Bojack’s body is removed from his familiar reality, and his body changes as he loses control over it. This is a clear example of how animation provides artists the space to play in a world of abstract forms, where absolutes of how a body can or cannot appear can be rethought and reestablished.

Fig. 4 - Bojack is a rough stick-figure sketch.

A deeper layer of emotional storytelling is also present in this scene, one which employs the deconstruction of the animation beyond simply paying homage to the past or as a creative experiment. The scene also makes concrete all the intangible and inexpressible feelings we experience as humans. In the scene just prior to this, Bojack hallucinates one of the show’s main characters Diane, who says to him that “he loves treading water” while he literally treads water in a painting of his pool hanging near her. The series itself follows Bojack’s desperate attempts to be a better person despite believing he is stuck in his dark impulses, and psychorealism allows animation to manifest this internal struggle of his visually to the viewer. Psychorealism – as coined by Chris Landreth – refers to animation’s ability to penetrate the psyche and manifest internal realities through subjective visual representations of our individual perceptions of the world (Moore 2015). In this clip, Bojack’s internal reality is his fear of confronting his own behaviour and accepting himself. The animated penetration visualises this by not only literally stripping him down to a swimming costume, but also by stripping him of his body by blurring the space between physical and metaphorical worlds as he loses his grip on reality. In a more literal sense, the clip visualises Bojack’s subjective, heavily-impaired perception of his surroundings while high on hallucinogenic drugs, providing a glimpse inside a personal bodily experience which would be impossible to replicate to the same extent in live-action. Through the deconstruction of animation, medium specificity becomes the thing that tells the story in this scene.

To conclude, this clip from Bojack Horseman is part of a legacy of deconstructive animation, playing with form in a way that intentionally references a trope key to some of the earliest forms of animation. If the nature of animation is to “foreground its process and artifice,” then the appearance of the hand of the artist playfully signals to the viewer that exact artifice, calling attention to the ‘seams’ in the reality by directly responding to the audience’s knowledge that what they are seeing is artificial. In this clip the hand of the artist is more than an homage: it is a visual metaphor for Bojack’s internal struggle that is made possible through animation’s ability to penetrate and visualise the unimaginable. It is a scene in which the medium itself is allowed to play around with its central character, and where animation and its history become the storyteller.

**Article published: April 4, 2025**

References

Al-Ali, Hana. 2019. “The Shape of Character Design” Media Reflections: Past, Present, Future (December 5, 2019), available at: https://medium.com/media-reflections-past-present-future/the-shape-of-character-design-78c66eb97518.

Crafton, Donald. 1993. Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Evans, Alex. 2007. “‘All Right: Where Am I?’ ‘Looney Tunes’ Animation as Modernist Performance.” Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2007): 378–388.

Dhaenens, Frederik and Sofie Van Bauwel. 2012. “Queer Resistances in the Adult Animated Sitcom.” Television & New Media 13, no. 2: 124-138.

Moore, Samantha. 2015. “The Animated Documentary and ‘Psyschorealism’.” Animation Studies, available at: https://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/staff/research/7881.

Patrick, Eric. 2004. “Representing Reality: Structural/Conceptual Design in Non-Fiction Animation.” AnimacMagazine 3: 36–47.

Wells, Paul. 2002. Animation: Genre and Authorship. London: Wallflower Press.

Wells, Paul. 2019. “‘Perfect Bridge over the Crocodiles’: Tacit Contracts, Listen Thieves, and Emotional Labor in the Animated Fago.” In Emotion in Animated Films, ed. Meike Uhrig, 15–34. London and New York: Routledge.