Adult Swim’s caveman-dinosaur thriller bombs the fantasy genre back to the Stone Age.
The undead dinosaur chokes out a blood waterfall while skin pours off its rotting cheek.
Boulder-sized maggots with sharp slicing backbones swarm out of a dark cavern, and they are hungry.
Credit: Adult Swim
A man scalds loud over a sacrificial campfire while antler-headed crones sing unholy welcome to their faceless god.
This isPrimal, so the god rides a pterodactyl.
Yes: A show about a caveman and his pet Tyrannosaur, or a Tyrannosaur and her pet caveman.
And the brilliant animated series unfiltered imagination harkens back to an earlier era of fantasy.
Witness decades of genre evolution bombed back to the Stone Age.
The caveman is preverbal, with grunts memorably voiced by Aaron LaPlante.
His limbs are as big as tree trunks.
The show premiered last year with one of the most brutal pilots Ive ever seen.
Our hero the credits call him Spear had to watch his whole family get eaten alive.
He met a green Tyrannosaur Fang and then her cute widdle baby Rexesalsogot devoured.
YetPrimalis so much more than a sadisticLand Before Time.
Man and beast are constantly stopping to catch their breath or share a fresh-kill dinner.
The first five episodes aired in 2019 (and are currently streaming on HBO Max).
Tartakovsky is a true original in the animation field.
He’s best known forSamurai Jack, a techno-magical swordpunk odyssey.
The mainstreams just now catching up to that kind of toybox mentality.
Its a statement of purpose, I think, thatPrimalis so completelyJacks opposite.
Tartakovsky has declared homage to Robert E. Howards Conan mythos and artist Frank Frazettas ultraviolent butt-muscle fireglow illustrations.
Two of the dinos lovingly wrap their long necks around each other.
The serene moments evoke their own form of tension.
Violence erupts whenever things are too lovely.
I thought the episodes last year were pretty much perfect, every half-hour a fearsome feat of unlikely survival.
The upcoming episodes hit new highs and suffer occasional repetitions (including two consecutive climactic fire-deaths).
For an Adult Swim fiend like me,Primalimpressively discovers new realms of outright weirdness.
Theres a classical quality to the storytelling, too, more straightforward than the networks usual ten-layers-of-meta deconstruction.
The finale promises a more expansive saga in the already-ordered second season.
Something or someone is out there, unlike anything Spear and Fang have seen before.
You sense that Tartakovsky is just getting started.
Its a good time to get lost inPrimals world.A-
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