UPS AND DOWNS OF FAMILY LIFE

The duo behind ‘BoJack Horseman' team up again for Netflix's 'Long Story Short,' a nonchronological trip down memory lane

- TRACY BROWN

"LONG STORY SHORT" creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg and supervising producer Lisa Hanawalt are longtime friends.

The glass partition wall in Lisa Hanawalt’s office is lined with reference sheets dedicated to the members of the central family in "Long Story Short."

Each page lists a character’s name, birth month and year along with their zodiac sign — and a dated timeline of full-body images that tracks how they look at different ages. Depending on the character, this includes their designs as children, teens and middle-aged adults.

During a mid-August morning at ShadowMachine studio, Hanawalt sits at her desk, pulling up different looks of earlier incarnations of the characters that she did before their final designs were set along with newer works in progress. Raphael Bob-Waksberg sits just behind her as they point out little details that they’re fond of and bounce their thoughts back and forth on whether certain characters might drastically change their appearance one year, as people tend to do.

"It’s a fun thing you don't get to do on a lot of animated shows,” says Bob-Waksberg, the creator and showrunner of “Long Story Short.” “To evolve with our characters and dress them up and have so many different looks for them.”

On most animated sitcoms, characters are trapped in time: perpetually the same age, usually wearing the same clothes, rarely even getting a haircut — no matter how many holiday episodes they get through the years. Not so on “Long Story Short,” where the passage of time is a feature.

"It’s really fun to get to know the characters and to think about their aesthetic,” says Hanawalt, the show’s supervising producer. “We have to draw a lot of different versions of everybody.”