Please welcome to the stage, Lisa Hanawalt!
[applause] >> Hi, everybody. I'm Lisa Hanawalt. This
was my idea for an outfit, but I didn't have time to make it. [laughter] Maybe next time.
I'm an artist. I write and draw comics, and I'm the production designer and producer of
an animated TV series called BoJack Horseman. [applause] Oh, good, you guys have seen it.
And I'm a bad artist. I'm lazy and I'm untalented and bad. That's not really true, but it's
how I feel a lot of the time. And when I'm looking back at my favorite projects over
the last decade, I've noticed how often they were preceded or motivated by really negative
emotions like this. I get something similar to creative block, but I would just call it
paralysis. I'm just afraid to make anything at all. I'm afraid it will be shitty. And
when other people ask me for advice on making stuff, I say stuff like... Just keep making
things. Don't worry about it. Just make it and think about it later. And that's easier
said than done, because you want the stuff you make to be so good and better than all
the stuff you've made before, and good enough to live up to your crazy expectations of what
makes a thing good. [laughter]
I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot because it's an ongoing cycle. And I'm not saying this to
complain. I just think a lot of people have this problem, and part of the solution for
me is letting myself feel like shit. That's part of my process. Most of my art projects
are either inspired by anxiety and negative emotions, or they're like a release valve
from anxiety. One day I was walking around New York City, feeling really frustrated and
angry with myself for procrastinating on yet another project, and I started saying to myself...
[laughter] Do it! Do it! Come on! Just fucking goddamn do it. Be done with it already. I'm
sorry for swearing. But that's what I really said. And I thought... That's so messed up,
that I can't say that without immediately thinking of Nike. [laughter] Like, they've
claimed this super useful phrase and they've robbed me of that space in my brain forever.
I'm a hypocrite, because I'm wearing Nikes right now. They're my favorite. But anyways...
I started thinking about what other corporate slogans are taking up mental space without
my permission, and I thought it would be fun to pretend I was, like, a rogue advertising
agent who is pitching new slogans to corporations. [laughter] “Subway. Eat the same.” “Subway.
Smell bread.” “Subway. Eat a tube of food.” [laughter] [applause] “Food option.” So...
I would make these, and then I would tweet them at the companies. [laughter] Like, I'm
not normally such a troll, but I kind of think corporations deserve to be trolled. And I
was in kind of a dark place, and I don't feel bad for them. I don't care. “McDonald's.
I like ‘dis.” “No thank you. I said, no thank you. No.” “I love something.
Is it this?” “I'm currently lovin’ it.” “I'm tasting.” “I am m’self.” “Chevrolet.
I'm a big boy.” “KFC. Brown rainbows of food.” “Toyota. You need a fucking car,
unfortunately.” So I made a ton of these. And I just think it's funny that they came
from this, like, super negative place where I was really beating myself up, and that's
what inspired them. Extra Egg Room is a horror comic I made a few years ago about a character
named He-Horse. This idea came from an anxiety dream I had about flying. I try to write down
my dreams, because while dreams are extremely boring to describe to people and to listen
to, they have this twisted logic that is interesting. It’s helpful for me to think in a dream-like
way when I'm writing a very visually surreal story that is based on very real emotions
or fears, the way dreams often are. This is a comic I made called Moosefingers. Five years
ago, I was living in New York and struggling with agoraphobia and feeling creatively blocked
and having a lot of trouble making stuff. So I made this comic about a character named
She-Moose who starts sculpting a series of clay fingers. She gets this idea to make fingers
and doesn't know why she's doing it or where she's going and what it's going to mean later
in her life, but it's all she feels like doing and it fulfills this need of hers to be creative.
Later she's lying in bed with her cat boyfriend, complaining about how she feels lost and aimless
in what she's doing. She says it's so hard to focus lately. All
my ideas are stale, my sculptures are stupid. I'm just making a pile of weird fingers. And
her cat boyfriend says, it doesn't matter if you're feeling good or bad when you make
stuff. These fingers are going to come out good. So just get to work, stop crying. Move
your hands. Which is kind of blunt, but it's the kick in the ass she needs. Because it's
true that having negative feelings about the work doesn't affect the actual quality or
value of the work. Anyways, that's a true story. I made all those fingers. I'm the moose.
My boyfriend is the cat. He said those things to me. And it helped me have that epiphany.
It doesn't matter if you feel bad while you're working. I feel healthiest when I take breaks
from drawing to make 3D objects, even if they're really ugly and creepy and don't serve any
purpose. I'm not selling these. Nobody wants them. But just the act of making them is serving
an emotional or creative purpose. So... [laughter] I briefly mentioned agoraphobia earlier. I
only picked this picture because it's outdoors. I've had this to some degree since childhood,
and it's embarrassing, but it's just very easy for me to come up with reasons to not
go outside. I might get in a car accident or I might have a panic attack or I might
get sick or I'm afraid I'll explode and all my insides will come out. This fear and anxiety
gets worse the longer I go without challenging myself to do scary things. So when Lucky Peach,
a quarterly food magazine, asked me to write and illustrate a regular column for them,
I used it as a motivation for going outside and doing stuff in the world. For this one,
I took a trip to Las Vegas to write about all-you-can-eat buffets. For this one, I hung
out with Wiley Dufresne, a chef, for a day, and it was super intimidating, but if it's
my job to go out and report on something and talk to a person, it makes it easier. I wrote
this piece about swimming with baby otters. Sometimes I just use these assignments as
an excuse to go out and have an animal encounter. And now every day I'm not covered in otters
is a piece of shit. Doing these pieces allow me to be a braver
version of myself. The journalist version of Lisa is not as timid about talking to strangers
and visiting new places. This is a picture of me and my friend Emily Heller, a very pretty
picture. She's this incredibly funny comedian who I met a couple of years ago in New York.
And after we first started hanging out, she said... Hey, do you want to co-host a podcast
with me? And I said yeah, okay. Because I didn't think it would actually happen. I didn't
know her that well. I didn't know that Emily is really good at accomplishing things, making
things happen. And she's not as hesitant or shy as I am. So we started the Baby Geniuses
podcast. I came up with the terrible name. We started it three years ago, and we just
recorded our 100th episode. [applause] Yeah! Thank you. It's super challenging for me to
feel comfortable meeting new people and interviewing them and making jokes out loud into a mic,
but those things are never going to be my forte. But doing the podcast with Emily has
really helped me feel more confident, and it's super fun. A few years ago, I started making illustrated
movie reviews, and War Horse was my most popular piece, and I think the thing that really made
it special is I'm completely obsessed with horses. “Mom, is it legal for people to
marry horses?” When I was a kid, I used to crawl around, pretending I was a horse,
and I got made fun of it a lot, of course, and it became a source of shame as I got older,
and other people found my obsession off-putting, and I can't blame them. This is a class assignment
from the 6th grade, where we had to write about ourselves. I’ll just read it really
quick. [laughter] “To start off, I'll make it clear that I really like horses. I really
like horses. I really, really like them. Everybody that knows me says it's more than an obsession.
They're probably right. People make fun of me and they call me horse poop and lady horse.
I just take it as a compliment, because I figure they must like horse poop a lot, because
they say it whenever I walk past. I'm also wild about art. I want to be famous for drawing
horses someday.” [applause]
>> Yeah. So that's never really gone away. That's, like, the core of my being. And this
movie review was the first time I really came out as being a horse girl in my adult years,
and it really resonated with people. Every character in the movie is, like, enchanted
by the horse. And that's exactly how I feel every day in real life. [laughter] I don't
know what it is about them. When I was in college, I made these enormous clay horse
heads for a sculpture class, and during our critique, my professor got really worked up
over how strange and enigmatic horses are, and at one point, she kept loudly repeating
-- what is it about their faces? What is it about the face? And we just stared back at
her like... Uh... So I loved War Horse. I cry every time I watch it. [laughter] It taps
into my childhood obsession. I wish I didn't like horses, because they're really dangerous
and unpredictable, but I can't help it. A few years ago, I started making this Western
adventure comic called Coyote Doggirl. And I love Westerns so much, but they're often
really racist and misogynist and most of them don't even acknowledge the horses. [laughter]
Like, we don't even learn their names, half the time. And it pisses me off. So I made
a Western where horses were the focus. When I originally sketched the story out, Coyote
was a man. I'm used to seeing male protagonists in stories like this, so it takes an extra
step for me to visualize it as a female. And I realized I had zero reason to not make her
a girl. I was just being lazy. So I gave her a sports bra. [laughter] And made her female.
A lot of the stories I write come from me feeling frustrated that that kind of story
doesn't already exist. I wanted a surreal, horse-focused Western with dog people in it.
And I couldn't find an example of that. So... I made it. In 2010, my high school friend Rafael emailed
me about his idea for a TV show called BoJack the Depressed Talking Horse. I said that sounds
really sad and cynical. I don't know if I like it. He's like... Okay. But then a year
later, he pitched BoJack to Tornante, a development company in LA, and he included my drawings
in his pitch. A year after that, I was hired to create concept art of the main characters.
At this point I had zero animation experience and I didn't know how to draw on a computer
so I was just doing watercolors by hand. I started this project with a ton of hesitation.
I was super cautious about getting involved because I didn't know what it would entail
and I didn’t feel confident about what I was doing, and I was super commitment-phobic
about working on such a large project and I was just “leaning out” all the way.
And we went through several rounds with the main characters and refined the look for all
of them and there were tons of notes and it was super difficult and tons of conference
calls and I was like... Well, that was interesting. I'll never work on this again. Then a year
later, Tornante decided to animate a ten-minute pilot and they convinced me to art-direct
it. Again, I was like... No, no, no. Well, fine. Here’s an example of me just, like, making
notes on how to make this office more cat friendly. Because it's for a cat person. So
I was creating character designs, and adding background details. And this is like a color
guide I made for a background. Animated TV pilots take a really long time to make, but
in some ways it was a blessing, because we had time to really flesh out the details of
the show. There were so many decisions that needed to be made. And questions came up,
like why don't the animals have tails? And can cats be pink in this world, and is that
a dye job or what? I hope to carry that secret with me to the grave. [laughter] Almost a year after we created the pilot,
Netflix bought BoJack, and I moved to L.A. to work full-time as a production designer.
This was my first job where I was working with other people, and it was fucking terrifying.
There are tons of people all working together to make this thing, and I was thrown in there,
and I had to stand up in front of them and say... So I'm not an animator, I've never
done this before, but here's how I want you to draw clouds, and at night, they're going
to be purple. And there's all these talented animators who have been doing this for years,
and all I had to go on is my own style of drawing, and my own taste for what makes things
funny or beautiful or interesting. We're currently in production on season three. [applause] >> Yay! And I really have grown to love working
as part of a team. It can be frustrating to coordinate so many different people with so
many different points of view, but it's actually rewarding to collaborate when the other people
are really talented. It makes my work better. And I'm slowly getting more confident that
my decisions aren't stupid, and I'm not a fraud, and there's a reason I'm trusted to
do this. Part of what I love about working on the show is that it seems like a wacky
sitcom at first, but it's actually written from a really personal and emotional place.
And my goal is for people to be able to pause it at any moment and for there to be a story
behind what me and the other artists have drawn in there. I don't enjoy working on projects
when I'm not emotionally invested in what I'm drawing. I'm going to leave you with one last story.
Planting is a comic I did recently for Lucky Peach magazine, and it's about a young bird
couple who buy their first home. And the wife starts this hobby of collecting plants, and
filling up the new house with them. And they start harvesting the plants and cooking them,
and they don't even need to go grocery shopping anymore, because everything they need is grown
in the house, and then she starts making pots to keep all the plants in, and she becomes
more and more obsessive about her hobby, and the entire house is just filling up with these
grotesque pots and plants, and they invite their friends over for dinner, and it's okay,
but their friends are like slightly weirded out by it, and they're a little judgy. And
the wife starts to literally disappear into her hobby, and her husband has trouble finding
her when he gets home from work. Sometimes she's inside a giant plant, tending to it,
sometimes she's curled up in a pot asleep. And the story ends with this conversation
where her husband tells her that she has to let him in and stop using her hobby to push
him and other people away. And this is definitely something I do in my
own life, and I wanted to write a story about that. And about a functional, loving adult
relationship where it feels ominous and creepy at first, but the problems aren't that dramatic.
They're more subtle. There's no giant man-eating plant like Little Shop of Horrors. There's
just this issue of communication and navigating relationships with other people. [laughter]
I feel really lucky to have people in my life who understand my obsessions and anxiety and
have obsessions and anxiety of their own, and they can handle my weird feelings and
fears and connecting with other people and sharing those fears is a huge part of why
I make art in the first place. Thank you so much. [applause]
Wow, she's awesome.
This adds even more depth to the show. Bojack is definitely feels like it's something special.
Amazingly talented, I hope she never stops challenging herself. Lisa if you ever read this; The world needs people like you!
I'm glad she's famous for drawing horses now. :)
This is cool. I'm not someone that would identify as having anxiety or depression, but I think we all have fears to some degree. It's interesting and pretty meaningful to me to hear about how someone can take those fears to channel her success and help her stay above her mental issues. I'm someone that likes to really get emotionally involved in things I watch and interpret, and it's a show like Bojack that I can do that and connect with even at a basic level.
Wonderful. :) I never would have pegged her as someone lacking confidence. Very inspirational.
Thanks for sharing the video. It really struck a chord with me hearing how Lisa using negative emotions to push herself to get things done. I'm in a similar place myself, actually accomplishing quite a bit these past few weeks without really allowing myself to feel good about it. One the things that really attracted me to the show in the first place.
She's essentially a white Diane with a slightly differently colored outfit
I dressed up as Princess Caroline and my boyfriend as Vincent for Halloween, and a friend of mine who knows her tagged her in the picture I posted on Facebook and it was very exciting. She's the coolest.