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]