Inside ‘Long Story Short’: Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s Animated Family Saga for Netflix
by Carole Horst · VarietyRaphael Bob-Waksberg returns to Netflix with another animated series full of down-to-earth humanity and empathy, “Long Story Short.”
The series follows the Schwooper family — parents Naomi and Elliot, and kids Avi, Shira and Yoshi — through different years and even decades, as the family members 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 school, allowing the story to explore parental rights, among other things. It also allows Bob-Waksberg to time-jump more deftly than in a live-action show.
“I really fell in love with this idea of we can see these characters from youth to old age and back again, and have the same actors playing them the whole time and not worry about distracting prosthetics,” he says.
The idea also excited the show’s supervising producer and production designer, Lisa Hanawalt (“BoJack Horseman,” “Tuca & Bertie”), as well as 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 have to think about how we’re drawing the family, and being very precise about that in a way that you can’t when you’re hiring actors,” he continues. “You can control the environment and animation in a way you never can in live action — unless you’re Wes Anderson or something. The level of control that you have allows a more intricate and interesting kind of storytelling.”
He also loves the collaboration that animation allows. “One of the joys of working with someone like Lisa, who I’ve known forever, and Alison, who I’ve known for less time, but now it feels like forever as well, is that I really trust them, and I don’t feel like I have to micromanage them,” he says.
The show is colorful, and its look is distinct.
“There was a lot of intentionality — first of all, about making sure 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 look like its own world. And also, we really 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 maybe wouldn’t work in live action, opening up more storytelling possibilities.
The show is very specific — the Schwooper clan is Jewish — and “Long Story Short” not only explores different aspects of Judaism, it also probes family dynamics that people of any religion, or no religion at all, can identify with.
“I was really interested in telling a story about religion that took religion seriously in ways that I had seen it and experienced it, but not so much in fiction. That maybe is what is specifically Jewish about it. I felt like so many stories about religion that we see are kind of filtered through the Christian view of things, which is that this is so much about faith. And for me, my experience of Judaism was never really about that,” he says. “I feel like religion is so much more than that. It’s about community, it’s about culture, it’s about history, it’s about family and the ways in which all those things can be a balm, and also a straitjacket.”
He also wanted the show to explore different perspectives “and not necessarily be a soapbox for one specific point of view.”
Season 2 is done, he notes, although there’s no release date yet. And he hopes there’s a Season 3. “I feel like there’s a lot of stories to be told with these characters, with this family,” he says. “I’m really enjoying it. I want to go deeper.”