Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
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D E PA R T M E N T 21 KEYFRAME SUMMER 2020 21 SOMETIMES TO GET TO THE FUTURE, YOU HAVE TO REVISIT THE STONE AGE. SOMETIMES, TO MAKE AN EXCITING NEW STATEMENT, YOU TELL A STORY WITH CHARACTERS WHO DON'T UTTER A SINGLE WORD. this page: A still showing the caveman Spear and Tyrannosaurus rex Fang from Adult Swim's Primal. During the final season of his time-traveling samurai series Samurai Jack, series creator Genndy Tartakovsky started contemplating his next act. He went back to a series of drawings of a caveman and a dinosaur that he had toyed with several years before and brought a series of storyboards to producer Mike Lazzo and the team at Adult Swim. The untraditional man and beast story became the basis for the series Primal, a show that is by turns touching, heartbreaking, hugely violent and entirely dialog-free. Tartakovsky, who over the course of his career had overseen the mayhem of the Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack, figured his audience was maturing and might be willing to follow him on this new primitive adventure. "We were seeing that there was a big audience for adult animation. We could finally get to the point where, yeah, we don't just have to do irreverent comedies. We could kind of do whatever we want," says Tartakovsky. "We even talked about it. I said, 'I don't know how this is going to look on the air,' but that's really not my concern." Within the realm of adult animation, tastes are expanding and boundaries are being breached about as routinely as some of the creatures dispatched by Primal's dinosaur, Fang. The expansion of programming streaming services—particularly those without ties to advertising—has opened up the playground to the point where a seriously off-the-wall premise could very easily end up establishing a new animation frontier. Netflix's The Midnight Gospel is Duncan Trussell's podcast brought irreverently and mind-blowingly to life with animation by Pendleton Ward and Jesse Moynihan. Turner's Final Space went literally into the stratosphere (well, with some help from NASA) to establish its visual universe. Back on earth, the mantra of Netflix's coming-of-age comedy Big Mouth, according to Co-Creator and Executive Producer Nick Kroll, is "we give zero fucks" as the humor and the nudity has ratcheted up the animated raunch factor to new levels. Big Mouth will have a new equally foul mouthed playmate joining the slate with Hoops, the saga of a down-and-out basketball coach hoping to take his high school team to glory. Though new adult animation programming is delving deeper into unconventional origins and spruced-up aesthetics, many of the artists involved cited the influence of much-loved, long- running animated shows while acknowledging that they also want to break free and try new things both visually and thematically.