There’s a reason animal metaphors are used so often by creators, especially in visual media. Animals, as Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, reveal something crucial, something elemental about ourselves, precisely because they’re the all-important ‘not-me’ entity — a child looks at an animal and, while it may not understand the nature of its consciousness, it understands that this is a creature that’s firmly ‘not-me’. Animals are the first Other, and in many ways, the most elemental ones.

Therein lies the potential for exploring existential questions through animal metaphors — being dog-tired after working like a horse all day might prompt you to sneak out of the office a little earlier than usual, your movements quiet, cat-like.

Tuca & Bertie , Netflix’s latest adult animation show, extracts the maximum mileage out of its animal metaphors, providing a gentle but pitch-perfect critique of the frenetic times we live in, filtered through the lives of its bird-women protagonists, an extroverted, super-confident toucan called Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) and a somewhat neurotic, ‘normie’ (normative) songbird called Bertie (Ali Wong). The creator and showrunner behind this splendid new comedy is Lisa Hanawalt, the artist and illustrator who designed the characters on BoJack Horseman , Netflix’s previous smash hit and now one of the most popular animated shows around.

At the heart of the show is the friendship between the two protagonists, at a crossroads when we see them first. Tuca has recently moved out of the Bird Town apartment the two shared, because Bertie’s boyfriend Speckle (Steven Yeun) has moved in. Bertie is also contemplating becoming a full-time pastry chef instead of the soporific data processing job she has at Conde Nest (after Condé Nast, the company that owns magazines such as GQ ). While Tuca is eager to accommodate her friend’s ‘normie life plan’ , she feels that Bertie ought to be more assertive, a bit more of a risk-taker personally and professionally.

This leads to a series of enterprising story arcs, both at home and at Conde Nest. One of the first bravura moments happens when Bertie struggles with a credit-stealing colleague (a rooster — not the most subtle visual joke, but then this is an eminently unsubtle issue); if you’re a woman, you probably know the type — loud, serial interrupter-of-women, uses a lot of hand gestures and isn’t above sneaking a quick peek at your notebook when the boss is not looking.

When Bertie is overlooked again and again for a long-overdue promotion, she asks Tuca for help. Immediately, the domineering Tuca bulldogs her way into the office as a temp, and sets about changing the way meetings are run. The next time the rooster speaks over Bertie, Tuca blows a shrill whistle, bringing proceedings to a halt. She proclaims triumphantly, “That’s the alarm that sounds when no women have spoken out loud for three minutes!”

I mean, you can laugh (as this writer did, loudly, alarming his own animals in the process), but the truth is that so many workplaces today need about six of these alarms.

From that point, Tuca & Bertie leaps from triumph to triumph, tackling love, loss, friendship and the oddities of the post-Internet era with an admirable insouciance, stylistic flourishes, gloriously bad puns, and a great many visual gags across different styles (sock-puppet animation et al).

A recurring theme is the transition from your early 20s, a time of personal and professional experimentation, to your 30s, a time when your peers and your friends expect you to settle down, in every sense of the word. We live in an era where ‘adulting’ is a verb and a fairly popular one at that — our default thought on the subject is a half-joke.

This is referred to in a gag where Tuca discovers a neighbourhood called, quite simply, Adulthood. The three-minute sequence where we discover this wondrous place is a thing of beauty — every element in this tableau gently pokes holes into our collective suburbia fantasies. There are shops with names such as Furniture Already Put Together (how can you not chuckle at that?) and my personal favourite, Matching Crockery.

Meanwhile, there are other things to contend with, such as Tuca’s neighbours the Plant People, who happen to have contraband plants for heads (thus completing the ‘pothead’ visual joke). Or the matter of Tuca’s sex bugs, which are like regular bugs, only they multiply rapidly and insist on throwing a loud party everywhere they go (partying consists of mainly two things: music and rubbing one’s body against any available surface).

Both Wong and Haddish are perfectly cast, and they’re clearly having a great deal of fun with these remarkable characters.

All of which makes Tuca & Bertie very ambitious — and the prospect of future seasons exciting.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW