Animated Feature Contenders: "Primal"
Saturday, January 11, 2020 at 3:48PM 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...