Tuca & Bertie Creator Lisa Hanawalt

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Lisa Hanawalt is a cartoonist, writer, and author of four brilliant books, including Hot Dog Taste Test and My Dirty Dumb Eyes. Her latest book, Coyote Dog Girl, is also great. She's also co-host of the Maximum Fun podcast Baby Geniuses along with comic Emily Heller. You may be familiar with her work on the popular animated Netflix series BoJack Horseman where she's a producer. Hanawalt is the creator of the new show Tuca & Bertie. It's an animated series on Netflix and it's very funny.

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Tuca & Bertie is a show about two women. Anthropomorphic bird women, to be exact. They live in Bird Town. Tuca is a toucan. She's outgoing and fun, but kind of a mess, too. She doesn't really have a solid job. Bertie, her best friend, is a songbird, kind of a homebody, a little shy and deferential. When the show starts, she's just moved in with her boyfriend.

A lot of the problems Tuca and Bertie encounter are fairly human and grounded: relationship stuff, work problems, sexual harassment. But the world they live in is anything but. The show is breathtakingly drawn and totally surreal: Phones talk. Hospital equipment talks. Plants walk. Lisa based Tuca and Bertie off of characters from her books, characters she's lived with for a long time and sees sort of as extensions of herself.

Lisa talks to us about how intuitive creating Tuca & Bertie was at times, deciding what to ground in reality and where to take flight and why she should be allowed to ride Martha Stewart's pony.

A quick warning about this interview you're about to hear: there's some talk about sex in it, mostly just talking about body parts. If you or someone you're listening with might be sensitive to that kind of thing, we're giving you a heads up now.