Primal finally returns to that genius of Tartakovsky
Released in 2019 for Cartoon Network, this adult animated series was just the latest proof of his genius, a universe of incredible visual and narrative richness, a 10-episode saga we found ourselves in. umpteenth proof of a creative talent as it would serve in packs. Award-winning, considered a masterpiece of action and rhythm, aesthetics and storytelling, it fascinated the audience. Now comes the second season, and it is the right opportunity for those who have never followed it, to get to know Spear and Fang.
A revolutionary and daring artist Tartakovsky could not help but like, he always had everything to please, at least to those who believe in the purest and most free creativity. His style of animation, both in the cinema and in animated television series like Primal, has always fished with both hands in minimalism, detaching himself from the baroque and overloaded modalities of our contemporaneity.
The influence of the old Disney classics has always been evident in which everything was made understandable and immediate, although many have emphasized how much anime, modernism, expressionism and films have also been on the monsters of the '50s and' 60s, they have often found in him a fertile ground to take root.
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Do you want titles? Samurai Jack is certainly the first to do, a legendary series that has made him a world icon, but before that he had already scored a pearl like Dexter's Laboratory. On the big screen, the Hotel Transylvania saga made him famous everywhere, with his love for gothic, the horror of Hammer and co, the Hollywood that he was, but also an exquisite sense of humor to say the least.
For Tartakosvky already at the time when he conquered a respectable place in the hearts of Star Wars fans with a gem like Clone Wars, the action dominates, the variation of colors, shadows and light, not the dialogues. The action defines and characterizes each character, his soul and his intentions, the movement reigns supreme often breaking even the barriers of credibility but always in a coherent, imaginative and captivating way.
The expressiveness that he has been able to give to each of his creatures and to the diegetic universes has always bordered on the incredible in terms of fantasy, not to mention that Tartakovsky is the enemy of narrative immobility, of the characters who they remain the same and do not evolve.
In the same way, he has always shown that he wants to dare, that he does not want to put the viewer at ease, sinking his hands where possible in a dimension dominated by monsters, violence, death, suffering and grief, as well as from tenderness, irony, friendship and discovery of the new.
In other words for this great author, it is emotions, not logic, that dictate the law, that dominate his protagonists. And it is something that perhaps never as in Primal has he been able to make palpable in an almost dictatorial way.
Alongside Spear and Fang Primal, in all this, it stands out as a work of audacity and expressive capacity that is more unique than rare, a journey that can entertain, fascinate, but above all also talk to us about themes anything but trivial, inspired by the best of the legendary monsters and comics of the past.
The series initially stars Spear, a Neanderthal man who lives in a sort of uchrony, a Prehistory in which early humanity has to live with the last remnants of the Dinosaur kingdom, as well as with a world of creatures that seem to have emerged from a Lovecraft nightmare.
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Spear back from a hunt, he helplessly witnesses the massacre of his partner and his proletariat at the hands of a pack of theropods, and decides to go in search of those responsible, thirsty for revenge. It will be shortly before the clash that he will find himself making common cause with Fang, a young female of Tyrannosaurus who will be devoured by the same herd of gigantic predators.
First united only by the common enemy to be slaughtered, in short the primitive man and the carnivore, they will develop a complicity for each other which will then be articulated in a clear affection, they will become inseparable and they will face a sea of adventures and misadventures.
Incredibly seductive and colorful, Primal in the first season has been able to guide us in a series of adventures almost all self-contained, but connected to the struggle for survival by two incredibly different but also similar to experience and emotions.
Spear and Fang do not speak, no one speaks in this series, everything takes place according to body language, looks, gestures, there are screams and roars, tears and smiles , the lost alphabet of a world that cinema has tried to describe even in the past, not always convincingly.
Just think of past cults such as 10000 B.C., The War of Fire, Alpha, A Million Years Ago or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and many other titles. The idea of having men and great reptiles of the past in contact is undoubtedly fascinating ever since the "terrible lizards" were discovered, but no series has been able to develop such theories in a creative sense better than Primal.
Here there is truly the apogee of a child's imagination inside a paleontological museum.
Nature as an obstacle and a resource But all this should not lead us to think that Tartakovksy has limited himself to guiding us on an adventure in bright colors, full of clashes and battles. No sir. Primal sees Spear and Fang deal with hunger, thirst, with packs of crazy monkeys, alien creatures, hordes of hyenas, wolves and raptors, with monsters of the night and a whole world in which the element of the unknown is the master. Along with it, however, fear and discovery dominate. The man and the T-Rex are always afraid, they are always called to fight to survive, often giving free rein to their worst instincts.
Yet, more than once, in doing so they also feel a great shame and pain, as well as in walking alongside death and one's regrets, there is a great empathy in Spear's eyes and also in Fang's, in their gaze with horror at a brachiosaurus made zombie by a mysterious virus. But there is also gratitude for the world in which they live.
Hotel Transylvania: a monstrous exchange, what is the human Drac like? Starting January 14 on Amazon Prime Video, the fourth installment of the animated family saga effectively exploits role reversal, but in doing so sets boundaries to Genndy Tartakovsky's unique and extreme animation style.
The unknown was said. The horror and mystery component abounds in this series, as well as fantasy and an overwhelming violence, unreal as far as it touches the splatter colors, but it is never free, but rather perfect to talk to us about solidarity, the attachment between two beings that order natural predicts as nemesis, and instead they become indispensable to each other.
Now that this second season arrives, do yourself a favor and catch up on the first one, not only so as not to lose the thread, since in the new episodes there will be much more human presence, but also because it is one of the best animated entertainment products of the last decade.
What transpires from Primal in fact is also a deep respect for its public, which is never treated in a paternalistic way, but rather enlightened in a journey made of a never idyllic relationship with nature and what it has represented for centuries for man: a dangerous and treacherous container. Yet even in this there is beauty and poetry, there is a great teaching from this series, that our anthropocentrism is totally unjustified. We are only guests of this world, not its masters.
