Raphael Bob-Waksberg returns to Netflix with one other animated series filled with down-to-earth humanity and empathy, “Long Story Short.”
The series follows the Schwooper family — parents Naomi and Elliot, and youngsters Avi, Shira and Yoshi — through different years and even many years, because the members of the family evolve, navigating highs and lows, grief, anxiety and the gamut of the human experience. And it’s also funny.
Like his series “BoJack Horseman,” “Long Story Short” is grounded ,yet soars with flights of fancy: Wolves take over parts of a faculty, allowing the story to explore parental rights, amongst other things. It also allows Bob-Waksberg to time-jump more deftly than in a live-action show.
“I actually fell in love with this concept of we are able to see these characters from youth to old age and back again, and have the identical actors playing them the entire time and never worry about distracting prosthetics,” he says.
The thought also excited the show’s supervising producer and production designer, Lisa Hanawalt (“BoJack Horseman,” “Tuca & Bertie”), in addition to art director Alison Dubois.
“Let’s design Shira as a 20-year-old. Let’s design her as a 4-year-old. A 12-year-old! What things change and what’s consistent? We also must take into consideration how we’re drawing the family, and being very precise about that in a way you can’t if you’re hiring actors,” he continues. “You may control the environment and animation in a way you never can in live motion — unless you’re Wes Anderson or something. The extent of control that you have got allows a more intricate and interesting type of storytelling.”
He also loves the collaboration that animation allows. “One in every of the fun of working with someone like Lisa, who I’ve known without end, and Alison, who I’ve known for less time, but now it appears like without end as well, is that I actually trust them, and I don’t feel like I actually have to micromanage them,” he says.
The show is colourful, and its look is distinct.
“There was a variety of intentionality — to start with, about ensuring the show felt distinct from our collaborations. We didn’t want it to look exactly like ‘BoJack Horseman’ or ‘Tuca & Bertie,” he says. “We wanted it to appear like its own world. And likewise, we actually wanted it to feel hand drawn.”
Bob-Waksberg feels that animation can put an audience in a more emotionally receptive place, allowing animated characters to say and do things that perhaps wouldn’t work in live motion, opening up more storytelling possibilities.
The show could be very specific — the Schwooper clan is Jewish — and “Long Story Short” not only explores different points of Judaism, it also probes family dynamics that individuals of any religion, or no religion in any respect, can discover with.
“I used to be really all for telling a story about religion that took religion seriously in ways in which I had seen it and experienced it, but not a lot in fiction. That perhaps is what’s specifically Jewish about it. I felt like so many stories about religion that we see are type of filtered through the Christian view of things, which is that that is a lot about faith. And for me, my experience of Judaism was never really about that,” he says. “I feel like religion is so far more than that. It’s about community, it’s about culture, it’s about history, it’s about family and the ways through which all those things could be a balm, and likewise a straitjacket.”
He also wanted the show to explore different perspectives “and never necessarily be a soapbox for one specific standpoint.”
Season 2 is completed, he notes, although there’s no release date yet. And he hopes there’s a Season 3. “I feel like there’s a variety of stories to be told with these characters, with this family,” he says. “I’m really having fun with it. I would like to go deeper.”