Raphael Matthew Bob-Waksberg (born August 17, 1984) is an American comedian, writer, producer, actor and voice actor best known as the creator and showrunner of the Netflix original animated series, BoJack Horseman. Bob-Waksberg also performs voices for various characters on the show, including a corgi and a tree frog. As a member of the Olde English comedy troupe, he co-wrote and appeared in The Exquisite Corpse Project. He was also the script doctor of The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part.
In March of 2018, it was announced that Bob-Waksberg had signed a deal with Amazon Studios to produce a new animated TV series he had co-created with BoJack Horseman writer Kate Purdy. The new series is an animated comedy-drama entitled Undone. The series revolves around a woman named Alma who discovers a "new relationship with time" after a near-fatal car crash and uses this to learn more about the truth behind her father's death. Aside from showrunning his two shows, he is also an executive producer on BoJack alumna Lisa Hanawalt's show, Tuca & Bertie.
Tropes Associated with Bob-Waksberg's work
- Art Shift:
- His first series, BoJack Horseman, is designed by Lisa Hanawalt, where the characters are either human or humanized anthropromorphic animals. The look of the show is very stylized and takes place in a world where characters are either human or half-human/half-animal.
- The style of his second series, Undone, is designed by Hisko Hulsing, the artist behind the Richard Linklater films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. The series uses rotoscope animation to tell its story.
- Central Theme: Both of his series focus on the human existence.
- BoJack Horseman focuses specifically on happiness and the difficulty of maintaining it in the complex situation.
- Undone focuses more on one's relationship with time.
- Genre Roulette:
- BoJack Horseman is a tragicomedy series that serves as a deconstruction of nearly every sitcom trope in the book.
- Undone plays more like a psychological drama mystery series.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Bob-Waksberg believes what makes something realistic, relatable, and powerful is mixing elements of the good and the bad, the funny and the sad.
- Signature Style: His shows uses the animation medium to tell very surreal, complex, and introspective human stories that have a lot of humor, drama, and profound themes.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: He considers BoJack Horseman to be an optimistic series, portraying a hopeful look at how people can push through the muck and try to get better in the face of a lot of brutal reality that will keep you down.
- Undone lies somewhere in the middle but could arguably lean more towards the hopeful side like Bojack.
