The Roger Rabbit of Adult Animation? Raphael Bob-Waksberg on Creating Emotional Cartoons

BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg made his long-awaited Annecy Festival debut in a packed and spirited masterclass, blending deep insights with characteristic self-deprecating humor. The Emmy-nominated writer opened up about his creative evolution, his collaborations with longtime friend and visual collaborator Lisa Hanawalt, and his upcoming animated Netflix series Long Story Short, which had its world premiere for the Annecy audience immediately following the session.

Bob-Waksberg described BoJack Horseman as a project born from collaboration, emotional truth, and a friendship with Hanawalt, whose drawings of anthropomorphic animal characters sparked the idea for the show. One of those sketches—a horse in a hoodie—became the starting point for the series. “They asked which show I’d want to make," he recalled. “I said probably the one with my friend Lisa—the horse one."

The show’s iconic setting, BoJack’s glassy mansion in the Hollywood Hills, was loosely inspired by Bob-Waksberg’s own time living in a tiny room in a lavish hilltop home he couldn’t quite afford. The contrast between external luxury and internal isolation became a central theme of the show. “I started thinking about a character who had everything and still couldn’t find a way to be happy," he said.

One of Bob-Waksberg’s earliest inspirations came from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which he credits as a major influence on BoJack. “Roger Rabbit showed me what was possible with animation—humans and cartoons sharing a world, but also that comedy could have weight," he said. Just as Roger Rabbit explored what happens to toons off-camera, BoJack Horseman investigates what it might mean for a talking animal star of a 90s sitcom to grapple with fame, regret, and identity once the spotlight fades. The surreal, showbiz-satire tone of BoJack owes much to Bob-Waksberg’s love for that film, which he described as both a creative North Star and a meditation on the responsibility of comedy itself.

Bob-Waksberg was quick to credit his collaborators. Hanawalt not only helped shape BoJack, but went on to create Tuca & Bertie, where Bob-Waksberg stepped into a supportive producer role. “Lisa had never run a writer’s room before, so my job was to help her feel confident and protected," he shared. “It was about holding up a tarp when the storm came in—making sure she had the space to be brilliant."

He compared this with his work on Undone, co-created with BoJack writer Kate Purdy. While Purdy was more experienced with the writing process, the technical aspects of rotoscope animation and international production presented new challenges. “It was like, what if we started where BoJack’s trippiest episodes ended, and just lived in that headspace for the whole series?"

Bob-Waksberg’s newest series, Long Story Short, is set to premiere August 22 on Netflix. Animated by ShadowMachine with a voice cast including Abbi Jacobson, Max Greenfield, Paul Reiser, and Lisa Edelstein, the series tracks the Schwooper siblings over decades, jumping forward and backward in time across episodes.

“It’s about the small traumas," he said. “Not cartoonishly bad parents, like BoJack’s, but the very real, subtle disappointments and compromises we carry with us." He described the show as “a funny family sitcom in structure, but one that plays with time not through sci-fi, but through storytelling."

The show reunites him with Hanawalt as supervising producer and several veterans of BoJack, but he emphasized that Long Story Short is designed to stand apart. “I didn’t want it to feel like a BoJack spinoff. It’s still unmistakably my voice—but told in a new way."

Reflecting on BoJack’s legacy, Bob-Waksberg hopes the show helped carve out space for more emotional range in American adult animation. “For a long time, adult animation meant Family Guy, South Park, The Simpsons. Our goal was to push out our elbows a bit—to make room for something more vulnerable, more surprising."

As for advice to animation students in the room, he offered a mix of philosophy and practicality: “Constraints are good. Sometimes we’d start with a ridiculous format idea—like an episode with no dialogue—and then build a story that earned it. Let the form inspire the content."

He also encouraged students to pursue what excites them, while remaining aware of how to engage audiences: “It’s not selling out to be strategic. Pitch the thing you love in a way that makes someone else love it too."

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