--- name: "Mike Hollingsworth" canonical: "https://film.one/person/mike-hollingsworth" roles: ["Director"] reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T02:47:01.028054+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Mike Hollingsworth Director. ## Details - **Work:** Director ## Fi1m on Mike Hollingsworth > Mike Hollingsworth is the man who kept *BoJack Horseman* looking like *BoJack Horseman* for six seasons, and the one who directed its boldest half-hour. A supervising director's work is meant to be invisible; his is the rare case where it shows. Watch the edge of any frame of *BoJack Horseman* and something is going on: a pun on a shop sign, an animal in an office job it is plainly unsuited to, a background character finishing a joke nobody in the foreground noticed. That density is what the series looks like, and keeping it up for six seasons, across episodes drawn by different teams, was largely Mike Hollingsworth's job. He was the supervising director, which means he oversaw the storyboards, the designs and the match between one episode and the next. It is the least visible job in animation, and on this show you can see it, because the drawing never once slackens into the flat, cheap look adult cartoons usually settle for. He did not train for it. "I never went to school for animation. My school was doing a decade of stand-up comedy," he has said, and the timing shows: the gags in *BoJack* are cut like a set, with the pause held a beat longer than seems safe. He directed episodes of *Brickleberry* (2012) and *TripTank* (2014), then the *BoJack* pilot in 2013, and stayed with the series from 2014 to 2020, later as co-executive producer. Alongside and after it he supervised *Tuca & Bertie* (2019) and directed episodes of, and produced, *Inside Job* (2021). The two episodes his name is most attached to are the two that break the show's own rules. *Fish Out of Water* (2016) takes BoJack underwater and takes away almost all of the dialogue, so that a series built on people talking too much has to work in near silence. We laughed at the physical business and were uneasy from the first minutes, and the reason was the silence itself: with no lines to hide behind, every visual joke also had to show us how alone he was. *Free Churro* (2019), which he supervised, is the opposite gamble, a single long monologue held in one static scene, and it works because the drawing stays still and lets the voice do the work. Our review of the series does not single him out, and that is fair. *BoJack* is Raphael Bob-Waksberg's writing and Lisa Hanawalt's designs before it is anyone's direction, and Amy Winfrey directed alongside him across all six seasons. What Hollingsworth supplied was the discipline that let the bright, hand-drawn surface and the misery sit in the same frame without either cancelling the other. Whether he can do it away from them is the open question. *Tuca & Bertie* lasted one season; *Inside Job* is the most recent test, and we have not reviewed it. The trouble with directing the directors is that nobody asks what your own film would look like. We would like to know. ## Biography Mike Hollingsworth is an American animator, director and producer. He began his career in stand-up comedy before moving into animation, directing episodes of series including *Brickleberry* (2012) and *TripTank* (2014). He served as supervising director on all six seasons of the Netflix series *BoJack Horseman* (2014–2020), also directing two episodes, and directed episodes of *Inside Job* (2021) and *Tuca & Bertie* (2019). He created the web series *Nature Break* and worked as supervising director and executive producer on *Cat Burglar* (2022). His episode “Fish Out of Water” from *BoJack Horseman* won a Cristal at the Annecy International Animation Festival in 2017. He has received Primetime Emmy nominations for his work on the series. *Sources: imdb.com, animationmagazine.net, bojackhorseman.fandom.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *BoJack Horseman* (2014), Fi1m 91, Director — [page](https://film.one/tv/bojack-horseman.md) ## Also known for - *Inside Job* (2021), Director - *Brickleberry* (2012), Director - *The Snoopy Show* (2021), Writer --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/mike-hollingsworth