Bojack Horseman
A humanoid horse, BoJack Horseman, lost in a sea of self-loathing and booze, decides it's time for a comeback. Once the star of a '90s sitcom, in which he was the adoptive father of three orphaned kids (two girls and a boy). The show was the hottest thing around, then suddenly, was canceled.
Bojack Horseman 2014
Buisness
Through a business lens, BoJack Horseman is about an industry that treats identity as a brand line on a spreadsheet. BoJack is a piece of legacy intellectual property from a cheesy 90s sitcom, and every agent, manager and studio executive sees him as a portfolio asset to be revived, leveraged or written off. His attempts at reinvention, from Secretariat to Philbert, look like risky rebranding campaigns that never address the underlying product, the damaged person behind the horse face, so quality control is impossible. The show lingers inside places like Vigor where assistants, writers and actors are interchangeable and burnout is built into the workflow, quietly suggesting that a system powered by image, gossip and short attention spans will keep producing new BoJacks faster than it can care for them.
Bojack Horseman 2014
Critique
As a series, BoJack Horseman uses a sugary, pastel animation style to carry some of the bleakest themes in contemporary television. The character designs are ridiculous on purpose, animal heads on human bodies moving through a world crammed with visual puns, yet the camera often settles into calm, grounded compositions that feel closer to live action drama than to slapstick cartoon energy. Across its run the show plays with form, from an almost silent underwater episode to a single long funeral eulogy and the surreal staging of “The View from Halfway Down”, where sets and color collapse into pure metaphor so the audience inhabits BoJack’s mental state instead of just hearing about it. Music and sound cues slide between sitcom jingles and hushed, uncomfortable silences, letting jokes and despair sit side by side in a way that feels disorienting and painfully honest.
Bojack Horseman 2014
Ethics
Ethically, BoJack Horseman is preoccupied with the question of whether someone who keeps causing harm can ever truly make amends. The story is open about BoJack’s history of neglect, self hatred and addiction, but it refuses to let those wounds erase what he does to people like Sarah Lynn, Gina or the New Mexico family who trusted him. Each time he seems close to change, the series shows how patterns reappear, how public contrition can slide into self pity, and how the people around him carry scars that do not vanish when he feels sorry. By the end, BoJack is still here yet no longer the heroic center of his own narrative, and the show leaves him sitting with consequences and with relationships that will never fully heal, offering a painful kind of hope grounded in accountability rather than a neat redemption fantasy.
