by Dennis Polifroni
TV REVIEW: Highly recommended
Suppose one had been paying close attention to the long-awaited 5th and final season of Genndy Tartakovsky’s magical and mystical SAMURAI JACK. In that case, one’d know that his next animated series, PRIMAL, was a natural and evolutionary step in Tartakovsky’s journey to becoming one of the supreme visual storytellers in modern animation. Several of SAMURAI JACK’s final episodes were rendered almost completely without dialogue, the main characters final acts of ingenuity and emotional drive, to thwart the nefarious, shape-shifting demon, Aku, were left to the visual designs of Taratakovsky and his team of character and background designers. Those final episodes said so much more without words, allowing the spirit and strength of the main character to preside over, and propel, the series to its jaw-dropping, dramatic conclusion.
Tartakovsky’s history in animation has always been about the visual. Exploding on the scene with the wildly popular, yet no-less inventive, kids show, DEXTER’S LABORATORY (a personal favorite of mine), then doing time as a chief designer and storyboarder on Cartoon Network’s most notoriously over-the-top, and beloved, THE POWERPUFF GIRLS, he often negated verbal jokes in favor of turning them into “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” visual gags. His style was always explosive, his sense of humor brought to the point of outrageous fantasy, and his thinking was that, instead of breaking a window for a chuckle, why not just bring the whole house down? Today, he’s looked upon as the Tex Avery of modern comedy TV animation, and his wordless, almost Rube Goldberg-style storytelling designs were almost always presented without a word. Tartakovsky is clearly a student of Avery, Goldberg, and, in the case of Wile-E-Coyote/Roadrunner references, the titan of word-less, visual gags: THE king, Chuck Jones.
But, the final season of SAMURAI JACK was something more than the ingenious inventiveness of the visuals, it was about emotional, dramatic weight. The series was cut abruptly off the air after it’s 4th season because Tartakovsky had been pegged by George Lucas to oversee, and direct, the animated extension of his STAR WARS franchise, CLONE WARS. As a huge fan of Lucas’ films, that were often a giant influence on his own original works (with huge shades of the film series informing and influencing the sci-fi/fantasy backdrops of SAMURAI JACK-along with Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER, David Lean’s LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and James Cameron’s THE TERMINATOR), Tartakovsky could not pass up the opportunity to be part of a franchise that was so much a part of his life and dreams. He intended to put SAMURAI JACK on hold and, hopefully, wrap up the time-traveling warriors adventures later in the year. However, CLONE WARS proved so massive, often veering into multiple story arcs, that Tartakovsky’s involvement lasted 3 years (2003, 04, 05), exhausted him completely, and saw him in meetings with Lucas constantly. CLONE WARS was a success, yes, but it so totally enveloped Tartakovsky that SAMURAI JACK was almost forgotten, and indefinitely shelved.
CLONE WARS, however, helped to further develop Tartakovsky’s penchant for dialogue-free visual sequences, allowing drama to take precedence over comedy, and to experiment, even further, with epic brack-drops that combined the real with the fantastic. It is precisely because of this, and his want to shake away jokey kids material, that the idea of creating works for mature audiences, saying something about our humanity and instincts for survival, and plopping them in existentially influenced fantasy worlds that mirror, at times, our own reality and history, that brought on the turnabouts, in tone, to the final season, 12 years later, of SAMURAI JACK.
The 5th season of SAMURAI JACK is so special. In addition to the visual flourishes and creative world building that Tartakovsky had become famous for, the sense of personal growth, investigations of themes like family and love, loss and growth, were all seamlessly injected into the visual dichotomy of the main character and the world he trekked through. It’s here, in those final 10 episodes, that Tartakovsky turns his back on children’s fare, and emerges a fully formed, adult, animation filmmaker. The result of this emergence was critical acclaim, with a microscopic eye on the human themes that were often brushed to the side in earlier seasons. The final episodes saw critics fawn over the wordless sequences and how perfectly they were able to express inner regrets, losses, hungers and sexual desire.
With all that, and a few industry awards in hand, the big question for Tartakovsky was: WHERE DO I GO NEXT?
The funny thing, I’ve found, with animation directors, is that the traditional route into more mature filmmaking isn’t the same as the traditional route taken by live-action filmmakers. A guy like Steven Spielberg can grow more and more mature, emotionally, with every foray into fantasy, science fiction and adventure, and come out of that growth with the desire to make films planted firmly in reality or factual history (in Spielberg’s case, the big moment was 1993’s Holocaust drama, SCHINDLER’S LIST). Yet, with animation directors, it seems that, because they can depict, visually, pretty much anything they see in their dreams, the temptation to create worlds and characters we’ve never, and will never, encounter in real life becomes too tempting to resist. SAMURAI JACK taught Tartakovsky so much and, as he grew older and wiser, so did the characters and the visual storytelling of his craft. The silent sequences allowed us to read the emotions on the characters’ faces, understand their resolve or plight through their physical presence and actions and, in essence, allow us to see something familiar to us in the most fantastical of worlds and situations. There would be no WWII/Holocaust backdrop in his future work but, the emotions and actions of real people would take center stage in PRIMAL, and his world, though never actually seen by a living, breathing, human being, would be scientifically accurate.
PRIMAL starts off as “buddy” story, of sorts, and anyone hearing the basic plot recounted to them at a water-cooler would probably roll their eyes at the premise (a caveman and a dinosaur navigate a dangerous, prehistoric landscape together, and rely on their friendship for help and protection), calling it “kids stuff”. That’s hardly the case with this new animated series (to date, there are 20, 22 minute episodes that make up the first two seasons. A third season will premiere next year on Adult Swim and HBOMax), and, though kids will be more than excitedly smitten with it (what kid, or kid at heart, doesn’t love dinosaurs?), it’s the adults that will embrace it for it’s maturity, existential themes, use of justifiable violence and it’s very real heart. It’s a series of life-and-limb adventures for survival, depicting harrowing encounters with what seem to be insurmountable adversaries and odds.
Tartakovsky gets right down to brass-tax in the first few minutes of the series opener (episode 1: “Spear and Fang”), and it’s his ability to create a serenely beautiful world (albeit fantastic), dotted by quiet introspection and calm actions, that go violently topsy-turvy in a heartbeat, that define the themes of the journey ahead. It’s a violent place. Violence is necessary to survive, and it’s precisely the violence that brings his two protagonists, usually mortal enemies, to a friendly bond. Since the dawn of story-telling, tragedy has often sparked a main character to fight for what is good, for peace, or to bring a community together against evil. But, in animated films, usually geared for children, tragedy is often relegated to being recounted verbally, or hinted at, as the iris of a camera slowly closes just before the tragedy occurs (hence, suggesting and never showing). It wasn’t until Pixar’s hugely popular and artistically ravishing FINDING NEMO that a tragedy not only opened the story of a mainstream animated film, but splayed it out, visually, to the viewer. It created a sense of deep loss, a sense of protective paranoia, that drove the main character to feats and adventures that would otherwise remain taboo to him. For PRIMAL, it’s the personal tragedies that target the shows main characters within the first 15 minutes of the story that forever inform their friendship, inform their bond, like Gulf War soldiers suffering from PTSD, and the unlikely, friendly pairing of predator and prey becomes the viable, necessary element to the journey they take. What’s even more striking, and inflames the emotions of the viewer through pure shock, is that the violent tragedies are presented purely on visual terms, without dialogue (though, Joel Valentine’s sound designs, and Tyler Bates and Joanne Higginbottom’s progressive/semi heavy-metal score, help the visuals with the heavy lifting), and that brings the viewer to them very much like an innocent bystander watching a baby carriage being struck by a speeding car. It’s quick, it’s unexpected, and it forever burns the mind. It also brings on the sympathies of the viewer, enrages them, and it’s precisely that trick of supreme visual story-telling that bonds us to the protagonists the same way they have bonded in friendship. The first episode is a stunner, it totally caught me off guard (and, I’ll admit, I was only thinking of Fred Flintstone and Dino when the show was recommended to me through a friend-I’m no longer laughing), and it left such an impression on me that I was compelled to see where the journey would go in the next episode, and the next, and the next.
The visual design of the series must be discussed. Because Tartakovsky and company are pushing through this journey without dialogue, the design aspects of its visuals need to immediately reflect the lush world of the dinosaur and the primitive man (yes, I know, neither ever walked the face of the Earth together, this is the one factual aspect of the series that Tartakovsky fucks with for emotional effect). Earth was untouched by industrialisation in prehistoric times and the backgrounds are rendered with a scientifically accurate, unblemished beauty that correctly shows us our world in its infancy. Whether depicting hot or cold weather, the visual designs of the series are rendered without exaggerations to nature and, as this is a relatively new world, there is a sense of newness, a sense of wild perfection to the backdrops. The background artist, Christian Schellewald, renders these landscapes through broad strokes of water-color paintwork, and then refines the details of each leaf, blade of grass, stone or snow-capped peak with a delicate colored pen line. These designs immediately brought to mind the water-color and sable-brush work of Calvin and Hobbes creator, Bill Watterson. The color schemes not only define the textures of the land, but also act as a representative of the moods the characters are experiencing. The character designs, almost totally Tartokovsky’s creation, are a combination of fantasy painter Frank Frazetta, illustrator Boris Vallejo, the fantasy stories of Conan The Barbarian by Robert E. Howard, and Alex Toth, whose square-jawed heroes were the main characters of Hanna-Barbera’s saturday morning cartoon fare of the 1960’s and 70’s (Space Ghost, Thundarr-The Barbarian and The Herculoids can be seen as precursors to Tartakovsky’s work). The thick limbs of the caveman, Spear, are as big as tree trunks, his body and face looking like they were chiseled from stone. The animal residents of primordial Earth are rendered almost completely realistic, at least according to science, but with a beautiful dumbed-down simplicity that allows them to glide across the screen without looking clunky when animated. The look of the series reminded me of the thick-lined Johnny Quest TV series, blended with the kind of effortless character work seen in Disney films as diverse as 101 Dalmatians, The Rescuers Down Under and The Emperor’s New Groove. Visually and sonically, PRIMAL is a knockout.
Click on names for archives
Writers/Founders
Wonders in the Dark 