Lisa Hanawalt on How ‘Tuca & Bertie’ Let Her Branch Out from ‘BoJack Horseman’

Netflix’s latest animated series Tuca & Bertie may look just like BoJack Horseman, but the two couldn’t be more different. That’s because with Tuca & Bertie Lisa Hanawalt, the creator behind BoJack’s distinctive anthropomorphic animals, is fully in charge. And her newest series replaces BoJack‘s underlying themes of depression with genre-bending zaniness without ever losing the heart behind its central bird women friendship.

“I loved working on Bojack for the last five, six years, but [the animation] was one frustration I had with it,” Hanawalt said in an interview with Decider. Though BoJack Horseman takes place in a world filled with animal people, its animation is surprisingly grounded. Conversely Tuca & Bertie flops and twerks all over the place, introducing speech bubbles that can be grabbed by other characters, random bursts of silly text, boobs that literally run wild, and turtles that can climb any surface. It’s an animated comedy that distinctly feels like it’s putting its animation first.

“When we were first pitching Tuca & Bertie, we were talking about ways to make it different from BoJack and having it be a little bit more visually based made sense, because it’s based on my own work, which is a very even mix of writing and visuals,” Hanawalt explained. When she first got the animatics back for the series, she had a unique problem: it was too loyal to the script.

“We had a meeting with all the directors and were like ‘Hey, feel free to really break this apart. Delete parts of the script, add in other lines, look at my comics, figure out different ways to visually represent things. You can have word bubbles pop up, you can really break this open and add your own, creative spin on this,'” Hanawalt said. “I was worried the directors would be like ‘Oh no, this sounds like a lot of extra work!’ But actually, I think they were really excited by it, because they really brought a lot to each episode, and each episode really has the individual stamp of the director on it.”

Part of the series’ many visual gags are unabashedly sexual. Though there is sex in BoJack, its is often treated as a plot device and there’s rarely nudity. But boobs and butts bounce all over Tuca & Bertie for no reason other than they’re funny, which is true to Hanawalt’s distinctive animation style.

“It’s not necessarily meant to be erotic, it’s just sort of silly. I take sort of a childish approach to that stuff. I like to breakdown what makes us human, what connects us,” Hanawalt said. “Like, we all poop. We all have these weird body parts that are supposed to be sexy, but isolated they aren’t really. Like if you smack boobs on a building is that still sexy? I don’t know.”

But even on a show that features sexy plant lady boobs and jelly lakes, what sets Tuca & Bertie apart is its gorgeous portrayal of female friendship. Tiffany Haddish voices the fun-loving, extroverted Tuca while Ali Wong voices her sweet and shy songbird best friend Bertie, who’s in a longterm relationship with her boyfriend Speckle (voiced by Steven Yeun). The series cheerily shows all sides of female friendship from frank talks about peeing in rompers to the silent, complicated fights that threaten to tear these two besties apart.

“I think a lot of people still aren’t used to seeing women portrayed in this way, especially in adult animation, where the majority of it is tailored toward a teenage male sensibility. Which is fine, there’s not a problem with media being made for them. But I want to even the playing field a little bit,” Hanawalt explained. According to the creator, Comedy Central’s Broad City made big strides in showing that women can be delightfully gross, and Hulu’s PEN15 continued that trend. “Women are disgusting, too. We joke about bodily functions all the time. I don’t know why that still feels taboo in some circles. I want to help continue to normalize that.”

Even in its bleakest moments Hanawalt’s series never forgets the deep love and respect between its central duo. Like Broad City and PEN15 before it, Tuca & Bertie is one of the few shows on television that portrays an authentic-feeling female friendship, one built on both complicated emotions and unending support.

“I worried when I was originally pitching the show, do I have to be a really good female friend in order to write about female friendships?” Hanawalt said. Instead of having the Tuca to her Bertie or visa versa, Hanawalt has a network of friends she’s close to who fill different needs. “I tried to write what it feels like to hang out with any of them and what our sense of humor is like and what it fulfills that a romantic relationship doesn’t. Because it really fills a different space. There are things that Tuca gets Bertie to do that Speckle couldn’t, even though he’s her boyfriend and her live-in partner.”

However Tuca & Bertie isn’t all silly one-liners and gooey odes to female friendship. Through its craziness, the series slowly and quietly drops darker storylines about what’s really going on in the inner lives of these bird women. One of those plot points revolves around Tuca’s sobriety.

“From the beginning I thought it would be interesting to add that to her character, but not have it be the biggest plot point,” Hanawalt said. The series doesn’t show Tuca struggling with alcoholism but jumps to halfway through her recovery process when she’s scared that people won’t accept the new her. “I have a lot of friends now that I’m in my 30s who are sober. For some of them it’s very dramatic and they have to hit rock bottom and all this stuff and it’s more like a BoJack trajectory. And for some, it’s more of an internal, personal decision. A lot of alcoholism you don’t even notice on the outside.

“I thought it’d be interesting to approach [Tuca’s sobriety] from that angle. So we don’t show it that much this season, maybe we will in a future season. I think it just added a layer to her character,” Hanawalt teased.

Even in these darkest moments, Tuca & Bertie never feels like it’s drowning under the weight of its own heaviness. The series always remains fun and funny even when its central pair on fighting.

“We always start with heavier stories and what the main core of each episode is, then we kind of layer the jokes and wacky stuff on top,” Hanawalt said. “The story is really the most important. … I think [Raphael-Bob Waksberg] my producer might’ve made this up, but it’s like a Christmas tree and the jokes are the ornaments you’re hanging on it.”

Watch Tuca & Bertie on Netflix