Give Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal the Oscar

Primal, the prehistoric pulp, animated mini-series now streaming on the Adult Swim app, ends as it starts: with entrails flying and rivers of blood. When the action in the finale “Rage of the Ape Men” roars, it does so relentlessly, accompanied by bone-crunching and meat-squelching sound effects for the viscera. At the center are two anicent heroes: Spear the Caveman and Fang the Dinosaur. Pulling the strings is visionary animator Genndy Tartakovsky, who, thanks to a clever bit of limited-release strategy, could win an Oscar for his work on the series.

Academy Awards campaign shenanigans be damned, he should.

You won’t find anything like Primal on TV or in movie theaters. The show is action-forward, but meditative. Eleven minutes — about half the run time — go by in the final chapter before a character lands a hit in a fight. The episode opens in paradise, with our heroes getting some lunch and swimming time in near a lazy waterfall. There are plenty of minor violent notes played, like Spear biting the heads off some fish and Fang getting a PTSD flashback to an earlier snake massacre, but the mayhem takes time to crescendo. For the past 20 years, Tartakovsky’s taken this tempered approach to storytelling in the face of manic, mainstream cartoon sensibilities. It’s all in service of character and choreography that gets under the viewer’s skin.

”Good action has good rhythm,” the director told Polygon in a recent interview. “The worst action is when it’s just fast, there’s no rest and you’re just obliterated.”

Dexter’s Laboratory, Tartakovsky’s breakout show on Cartoon Network, featured a premise not too far removed from Primal. Though set in the modern day, Dexter focused on the often-combative relationship between a younger brother and older sister who, respectively, like to create scientific wonders and destroy said wonders. They don’t go hungry if they don’t hunt for their food, but drama, survival, and action all factor into their dynamic.

In the pilot episode, “Changes,” the sister DeeDee dances en pointe into Dexter’s eponymous lab, surveying the technological wonders around her. It’s a seven-minute short, packed with gags in which Dexter and DeeDee change each other into animals using his latest device, but Tartakovsky still takes the time to pan the camera through the lab and across the hallway, introducing his audience into the siblings’ domain and situating us in a sense of place, easing us into their characters before they even interact with each other.

”Dexter Dodgeball,” another memorable episode directed by Tartakovsky and Craig McCracken, used action tropes (slow motion, groin attack, and defenestration, all in montage) to convey the pain Dexter feels in gym class. In response, he builds a badass, TNT-ball-launching mecha to annihilate his gym-class bullies. The episode ends with Dexter towering over them, relishing in his victory, before DeeDee chucks a single dodgeball at him, tagging him out of the game. The audience laughs because it’s hysterical, but if Tartakovsky or McCracken had timed it any differently, the joke could come off meaner or not land at all.

Samurai Jack — an action show with a lot less humor and far less dialogue — took Tartakovsky’s eye and ear for pacing to the next level when it launched in 2001. Long stretches of both classic episodes of Jack and its 2017 revival pass almost entirely without dialogue, or at the very least without dialogue from Jack. The show leaned heavily instead on its music, sound effects, visual aesthetics, and character animation to craft compelling narratives.

”Jack and the Three Blind Archers” from Samurai Jack’s first season still stands as the ur-text for this approach. Jack seeks out a mysterious well the archers are guarding in order to return to his past and defeat his mortal enemy, Aku, but finds the archers tremendously skilled, despite their disability. He winds up fighting them for eight minutes straight without saying a word, briefly by blinding himself. Jack defeats them, releases them of their curse, and even keeps his cool doing it, but it’s when things slow down that the archers tell him the truly evil nature of the prize he has fought so hard to attain. If he uses the well, he’ll damn his soul.

By the end, Jack’s only said a few lines, but you can see the slow-burning rage in his face and narrowing eyes. Tartakovsky slows the action so the psychological toll of Jack’s long journey weighs him down. It’s why several of the revival episodes, which start 50 years into the future, with Jack no closer to accomplishing his goal, are full of moody PTSD visions, some action-based and others purely internalized.

”Tartakovsky thought that the action shows he watched as a boy contained too much talking, and had plots that were needlessly complicated,” reported a New Yorker profile on him from 2002.

Tartakovsky’s follow-up to Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, was another violent action drama where the viewer becomes hyper-aware of every frame and every cut. Episodes clocked in between three and 12 minutes, but nonetheless, the animator managed to squeeze in drawn-out, elegantly stylized, Jack-style duel sequences between Anakin Skywalker and his enemies, the trademark angered glare, and even a giant red moon that would reappear years later in Primal. The result was a full series that wasted no time, but still managed to pack a satisfying emotional punch. At just over two hours total, it goes toe to toe with the other Star Wars movies.

Primal proves that Tartakovsky has evolved without sacrificing his core instincts. His animatics for the episodes, now released by Adult Swim, come with his improvised sound effects, the kinds of wooshes and shyoos and narrated descriptions a child with action figures would use to play pretend. For Tartakovsky and his collaborators, though, none of it is pretend. The scenes of Spear and Fang ripping through slithering river snakes and screeching Man-Bat lookalikes and stampeding woolly mammoths in Primal took time, labor, and care to animate just so. And it takes even more care to pull back from those scenes and invite the audience to relate.

I briefly entertained the notion, in the tranquil scene by a waterfall at the beginning of “Rage of the Ape Men,” that Spear and Fang might actually find peace, might actually be able to settle down somewhere. It went on for that long, and Spear and Fang both left a hand and claw print in the sand for each other. They could have a happy ending, I thought. That notion was ripped away once the episode kicked into high gear. Fang and Spear will never speak to each other, but we got so many tender, emotive closeups of their eyes that we’ll miss them now that this run of episodes has wrapped up.

You don’t accomplish that through scenes of death and gore. You do it with restraint and love. That’s award-worthy.

Eric Vilas-Boas is the co-editor in chief of the animation blog The Dot and Line.