An assistant director on the Netflix show breaks down the process behind the season’s best episodes.
Animation-focused blog The Dot & Line has been covering Netflix original series Bojack Horseman all week in well-researched, heart-tugging, spoiler-filled posts. This week of Bojack articles concluded yesterday with a look into the animation process of the show, linked above (with many spoilers still); here’s what you need to know if you’d prefer to avoid spoilers on seasons 3 and 4 of the show:
1) Bojack Horseman is produced by L.A.-based company ShadowMachine, who animated for Robot Chicken and many Adult Swim shows. ShadowMachine will be animating the new TBS animation Final Space from Olan Rogers and Conan O’Brien, and they’ve also been announced to be animating Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio film, but little information is available on the film’s status.
ShadowMachine will be animating Olan Rogers’ Final Space for its 2018 premiere on TBS.
2) While the pre-production is done in Los Angeles, the animation is done in South Korea (as are a majority of U.S. animated series). @shadowmachinestudio receives the scripts from the Netflix show’s writers and create their own outline and thumbnail illustrations. Directors pass the thumbnails to storyboarders after writers and producers sign off, and the storyboards are sent to South Korean animators.
“When you send them to [South] Korea, you can’t leave any room for misinterpretation,” [Bojack Horseman’s assistant director James] Bowman says. “You’ve got to make sure they’re animating the correct character, or it needs to be done again.” ... Ideally, Bowman says, “you make your storyboards really, really tight, so they don’t make any mistakes.
3) However, unlike many South Korean-animated shows, some animation is actually still done in L.A. rather than sent back endlessly for revisions. There are two options with revisions, reports The Dot & Line:
One: “If it’s not quite right, or they misinterpreted something, or it’s not animated to our expectations or something, we give them notes, send it back,” Bowman says. “They’ll get a chance to fix it and animate it again.”
And two: “Then it comes back to us [in L.A.], and if it’s still not right, then it goes to us, the retake animators, who make it look good and the way that we want it to.”
James Bowman and the rest of ShadowMachine’s retake animators are vital in meeting the show’s production deadlines because they can speed up the animation process. Collaborating with animators in another country can be difficult when there are language and timezone differences, so the retake animators are on hand to make fixes themselves. Retake animators rarely fix entire scenes on their own, however; they only work on certain shots that need to be changed.
4) Another addition to the season four workflow was an on-site ShadowMachine representative working in South Korea as a go-between for the two studios. “He worked in Korea to help with the translation process,” explained Bowman, who added that the representative’s work cut the need for retake animators by half because the final product “was a lot better animation than ever — a lot more polished, a lot more of what we were looking for.”
For more information on the highly collaborative process of television animation on Bojack Horseman, check out The Dot & Line’s “Bojack Week.”
- Courtney ( @harmonicacave )