Animated Feature Contenders: "Primal"

By Tim

A record-setting 32 films were submitted in 2019 for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Of these, the biggest outlier is the clumsily-titled Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal: Tales of Savagery, which only barely deserves to be called a film at all. It's a feature-length repackaging of of the first five episodes of the television limited series Primal, which aired on Adult Swim in October (with another five coming sometime in 2020), and which was never at any point intended to be seen in any other form than as discrete 22-minute episodes. The condensed feature-length version existed solely to have something that could be put into theaters in Los Angeles for a week to qualify for the Oscars, and there are no plans for it to ever see the light of day again.

Ordinarily, that would be the kind of rule-bending chicanery that we disapprove of here at the Film Experience, but I'm content to overlook it in this case. First, because it's extremely unlikely to pay off in the form of a nomination on Monday morning. Second, if Adult Swim hadn't played this cheap trick, I'd have no excuse to talk to all of you about Primal, which in any medium is clearly one of the major works of animation from 2019...

The series (which is streaming in its entirety on the Adult Swim website) is what happens when one of the world's most interesting animation directors gets a free pass to do whatever he wants. Genndy Tartakovsky has been a major figure for almost a quarter of a century, creating the series Dexter's Laboratory in 1996, and helping to set the aesthetic style of The Powerpuff Girls in 1998. Despite those major successes, Tartakovsky has had an inexplicably hard time getting projects off the ground ever since his series Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars ended in 2004 and 2005; a great many projects have been announced and abandoned, or announced and taken away, and for a long time, his career consisted solely of trying to make something of the dodgy Hotel Transylvania movies, a perpetual "one for them" deal that refused to translate into a "one for me". The long-delayed fifth season of Samurai Jack in 2017 finally broke this spell, and it leads us directly to the existence of Primal.

As suggested by the Tales of Savagery subtitle, the series is a self-consciously grim, weighty affair. It's set in a mythic past, where cavemen co-existed with dinosaurs and other giant animals, and where extreme violence and death are around every corner. There's something almost contrived and self-parodying about it, in fact. The very first scene of the series finds our caveman protagonist spearfishing, with lovingly-detailed streamers of blood flowing out of the dying fish he's hooked in the water. By the first commercial break, we'll have seen the caveman's family eaten by a tyrannosaur-like dino – in silhouette, but it still leaves very little to the imagination.

This kind of ultra-dark material can easily seem just ridiculous, particularly given that Tartakovsky and his animators have brought in the same basic aesthetic that he's used in several of his earlier projects for children. Characters are entirely flat, drawn as strong geometric shapes with thick black outlines; it's bold and cartoony. It ends up serving the gory material extremely well, bringing in a strong feeling of primitivism that matches with the setting and the smudgy primordial grandeur of the emotions the show engages with.

The simplicity of the drawings makes them very flexible. With not a single recognizable word being spoken even once in any of the episodes, Primal needs to have a highly expressive aesthetic to communicate its narrative, and this is exactly what those line drawings provide for it. Every facial expression is as easy to read as a child's crayon drawing, and the use of colors is motivated entirely by creating high-impact dramatic moments, rather than paying even lip service to realism. It's some of the best purely visual storytelling of any animated project of the last couple years.

It's not particularly sophisticated, mind you, but it's not trying to be. The story's not too sophisticated, either: this is about two individuals who've lost everything bonding out of their rage and grief forming a kind of family. In this case, those individuals are a caveman, Spear, and a tyrannosaurus rex, Fang (whose family was also devoured onscreen), making this something more than a "boy and his dog" tale and something less than a buddy adventure: the relationship between human and wild animal is fundamental to these characters, even if the later episodes increasingly show a mutual affection between the two characters. This is where all of that simplicity shines the most: the film traffics in big extremes of emotion in part because that's the only level that the human and the dinosaur can communicate on.

As much as this is a gleefully violent, horrifying series, it's much more impressive when it favors the melancholy that unites the two leads. This is a big, scary, empty world, beautiful in an epic, grandiose way, but also fundamentally hostile. The series' best moments are the ones that emphasize that, especially the deeply sad third episode, in which Spear and Fang cross paths with a mournful tribe of woolly mammoths. Ultimately, this a story of two traumatized survivors helping each other through a world that doesn't care about their trauma, and using big, bright colors to put all of the good, bad, and angry emotions front and center, to let us understand the great force with which they hit the main characters. It's an unrestrained and aggressive approach, but coupled with the considerable strength of the drawings themselves, it still ends up feeling artful and deliberate. I don't know at this point which five films are going to get Oscar nominations on Monday instead of this, but I do know that most of them won't be nearly this impressive.

More on the Animated Contenders
Frozen 2
Klaus
This Magnificent Cake 
Missing Link (Interview)
White Snake 
Ne Zha 
I Lost My Body
How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World 

The 32 Eligible Films
Current Predictions

Comments

[adri]

I’ve seen about 2 and a half of the short episodes. They’re incredibly gory and incredibly sad. I cringe at the blood splatter and cry at the loss. I guess that’s kind of ...primal?