You’ve never seen something likePrimalfromGenndy Tartakovsky, the animator behindDexter’s LaboratoryandSamurai Jack.
And yet his past work were almost stepping stones to this new series.
you’re free to almost track this development through his work.
Adult Swim
Then cameStar Wars: Clone WarsandSym-Bionic Titan, geared closer to a teen audience.
So, when the head of Adult Swim asked, “what’s next?”
“Going as far back asDexter’s Lab, we’ve always had these sequences with no dialogue.
Adult Swim
The interesting thing is those sequences got the biggest reactions,” Tartakovsky recalls.
Everybody reacted to them even more.
Then, without warning, something would rip through the silence and propel Jack into battle.
“They were just pulp novels, but they’re written so well,” Tartakovsky says.
This kind of storytelling, he adds, “fits perfectly for animation.”
Through their connection, man and beast find all of that as they traverse a harsh world.
“We were thinking about the Seven Deadly Sins and can we do all of it?”
The other big thing was, when you watch a nature show, you see an amazing-looking polar bear.
The show, too, gets to the primal core of Tartakovsky’s animation.
Born in Moscow and eventually settling in Chicago, he always believed he would be an animator.
Maybe he would do that for 15 years and then find a job as a director, he thought.
“Everything went differently, obviously,” Tartakovsky says.
Now, 49, he’s always thinking in terms of animation.
Primalrelies on his first instinct as a creator: movement.
“Movement,” he adds, “is what’s entertaining.
That’s the illusion of life.”
At first, there was a cold feet period when Tartakovsky sat down to draw the storyboards forPrimal.
Would he miss the dialogue?
Would they even be able to pull this off?
Quickly, he didn’t see this wordless world as a limitation.
Knowing your limitations without dialogue made it easier, in a way.
He couldn’t just have someone say they’re angry, so he had to show it.
They speak a different language."
Now, they’re working on five more.
“Some of those episodes might get TV-Mature.
For me, the stuff they show on Adult Swim is pretty crazy and we never curved ourselves.”
Even the violence itself harkens back to the title and the concept.
When we went into a sequence we always wanted to verify we were doing it for a reason.
That way we become honest with it."
