An animal can be closer to you than the dearest person - that can be confirmed by anyone who knows animals and knows people. The fact that you can feel deeply connected to a melancholy, drunken, completely worn horse, a drawn on top of that, came as a surprise when Netflix released the first season of "BoJack Horseman" in 2014.
BoJack is, as his last name implies, a horse that leads a human, or rather, male life. Once celebrated leading actor of his own kitschy sitcom called "Horsin 'Around", then crashed and written off. The final, sixth season, whose eight episodes are available since Friday on Netflix, then also starts in a withdrawal clinic in which BoJack final wants to bring his life back on the line. One last time he tells stories about lonely horses and lonely people who are never alone and yet completely abandoned. His loneliness stifles his breath the most when he's at the liveliest party. Because people and human-like animals (who populate his world on equal terms) may talk to him, but never listen.
Ugly cute gags and darkest feeling abysses
BoJack is a Trojan monster: his sometimes ridiculous, sometimes deepest, life's suffering tells you a lot of cruel and true about yourself, your own professional footsteps, your relationships with the people around you. Paradoxically, it may be easier to find oneself in BoJack's grief, just because he is not a human but a horse - a sly alienation effect that still keeps the reflection of one's own experiences on a playful, more tolerable level.
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"BoJack Horseman": Animation between cute and gloomy"BoJack Horseman" is an extremely smart series that works like a high-fathom fable loosely tapping between funny little gags (a wolf couple adopting a lamb and a cat reading "The Great Catsby") and the darkest sentimental depths , It is always about nothing less than the question of what happiness means, why this state is so damn hard to achieve and why we usually mess it up with our own stupidity.
Because Bojack had a bad, traumatic childhood, but the series does not let him get away with this apologetic free ticket. Maybe this is (apart from all the many animals and the fact that here at the reception of a detoxification clinic, just a selfish marmot works) the best part of this series: BoJack is, despite a fundamentally good heart, a classic, gloomy Dauerbrütender antihero, indeed not a lone wolf, but an abandoned horse - whose often classic toxic actions are not told away transfigured and admired, as happens so often with scratchy series types.
"BoJack, just stop," his former roommate Todd says to him instead: Anything that would go wrong with him, was not because of the alcohol, the drugs or the mischievous things that have happened to him during his career or as a child: "It's up to you, okay, that's all you are." The serial construct is not BoJack's accomplice, but it pisses him where it's needed.
And delivered with his fifth season a differentiated, unexpected contribution to # MeToo theme: Bojack's career is just because a hesitant crease up. He plays the eponymous lead role "Philbert", a brutal, macho cliché detective, slips back into the alcohol and tablet addiction, chokes in the end even his co-actress and girlfriend Gina - and is hailed by a stallion-believing industry anyway, because he as extremely male with his demons wrestles.
The grief budget is fairly distributed
"Nobody will hold you to account," author Diane tells him (who has a nice job as a promitweets ghostwriter in the meantime): "You have to take responsibility for yourself." Around this main plot, the fifth season builds digressions that focus on the female characters in the Bojack cosmos and tell their stories, especially their own very own search for their own identity. Taken together, they have at least as much weight over the season as the stallion-centric "Philbert" tale.
It is another merit of this series that it fairly distributes its grief budget. Even the ever-wagging Mr. Peanutbutter, a penetratingly proper, eternally well-tempered Labrador, struggles to have a lasting relationship. Even the happy ones are unhappy, this is perhaps the second most consoling realization of "BoJack Horseman".
The most comforting news is BoJack at the end of the second season when he is just trying to go jogging with a burning lungs. Exhausted, he collapses on the lawn as a baboon, babbling with godlike beard, leans over him. "It gets easier," he says, "it gets a little easier every day, but you have to do it every day, that's the hard part." "Okay," says BoJack, and "okay," you think yourself.