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...

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April Foolish Predictions #1: Animated Feature

[drumroll] It's Time! Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions have begun.

Please bear in mind that, though the predictions may actually seem foolish and will surely be out of date within a few weeks (if not sooner as more concrete news about the film year emerges), we are actually pretty good at this. Before each category we'll tell you what we generally score this far in advance. And if you think it seems low, that just proves to us that you haven't actually written down your predictions during the first week of april, not changed them with every scrap of news you heard, and then checked that hard copy nearly a year later to see how well it held up!

First up is Best Animated Feature where our traditional prediction score this early is 3/5. But 2019 might well hold more suprises than usual...

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