Review: Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal Is a Stunning Swirl of Violence and Grace

The show’s violence is a reflection of its characters’ existence, a cycle from which there’s no escape.

Primal
Photo: Adult Swim

Genndy Tartakovsky’s work as an animator is most striking for its embrace of silence. Even in the cacophonous realm of children’s cartoons, the Samurai Jack creator favors wordless moments that lean on the flapping of cloth in the wind or the exaggerated sounds of a clenching fist. Adult Swim’s Primal, then, feels like something Tartakovsky has been building to for much of his career, a dialogue-free miniseries following a caveman and his T. rex partner fighting to survive in a violent, unforgiving world. The caveman isn’t even explicitly named as Spear until the end credits of the first episode, and until then you might otherwise mistake the title, “Spear and Fang,” for a description of the violent tools put to use during its half-hour runtime. After all, what need do these characters have of names?

After the death of his family, Spear finds an uneasy companion in Fang, a mother T. rex whose babies he tries and fails to rescue at one point. The pair’s world is faintly fantastical, a pastel-colored landscape of thinly sketched details that recall the work of French artist Moebius, né Jean Giraud. With rocks and trees in hues of pink and orange that appear beneath a setting sun, the environment is as wondrous as it is hellish, a place of silence perpetually threatened to be broken by some predator’s intrusion. The show’s ecosystem swirls together many disparate time periods both real and imagined, presenting cavepeople coexisting with not just dinosaurs but mammoths, monkey-men, and blood-red bat humanoids.

The show’s chunky character designs convey clear emotions, from sorrow to irritation, through body language and wrinkled faces rendered in thick, black lines. Eyes are a repeated motif, whether in Spear and Fang’s extreme close-ups, the glassy and reflective stare of something newly dead, or the slow filling of an eyeball with blood. The series is a tightly wound watch of violence and grace mingled into one: Scenes tend to linger on clean, purposeful movements, such as Spear lunging through brush after a boar. Watching the sheer craft that Tartakovsky brings to Primal often feels like seeing gymnasts navigate some difficult routine with complete ease. The series makes constantly compelling use of space in its images, as creatures and objects lumber in from out of frame or a massive cliff face crowds Spear’s silhouette into the extreme corner. Enormous objects and animals frequently dwarf the protagonists, whose movements are shown in montage and silhouette and contrasts of bright, distinct color.

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The show’s violence is a reflection of its characters’ existence, a cycle from which there’s no escape. Children are swallowed whole, prey is devoured on the spot, eyeballs are smashed in by rocks, and dino jaws are smeared in vivid red blood. The carnage can feel a smidge overdone when the series indulges in sporadic but distracting slow motion, yet for the most part, the blood and the gore feel matter of fact. Everything needs to kill and eat to survive, and here the killing and the eating is couched in virtuoso action whose impacts you feel in your bones.

For his part, Spear seems regretful of his part in that violent cycle. Forged in the fire of his prehistoric proving ground, he and Fang are providers who lack anyone to provide for beyond themselves, their families long ago felled by the cold, impartial law of the ancient world. What’s left is only the faint, cross-species understanding of a desire to live on, because living is all that Spear and Fang have. And the story of the caveman and T. rex’s survival, in Tartakovsky’s hands, is totally enthralling, as terrible as it is beautiful.

Score: 
 Cast: Aaron LaPlante  Network: Adult Swim  Buy: Amazon

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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