I’ve said this many times, but Genndy Tartakovsky is one of the most talented animation directors alive, and Primal is the kind of project I’ve always wanted to see from him, but feared no one would ever let happen. Grim and dirty dramas about the harshness of nature don’t pay the bills; rubbery comedies about vampires do. Fortunately Adult Swim was willing to bankroll the former.
For the uninitiated, Primal is about a caveman and a dinosaur who form an unlikely alliance and stomp around a hostile prehistoric world, trying to keep each other alive. The series barely contains any words, allowing Tartakovsky to focus on what he does best: timing and action. The series won an Emmy last year and it just won another one now, though for a lesser category.
Primal’s production has been moving at the glacial pace of five episodes a year, but true craftsmanship takes time. The website Polygon managed to snag Tartakovsky for an interview that was posted this morning…here’s what he revealed about the upcoming Season 2. Basically, don’t expect Season 1.
“For the second season…we want it to evolve. We didn’t want to just do 10 more minor variations on the first season. This genre has been done so much. I wanted to do something different and push the genre out of the clichés associated with it as much as we could. And the second season is pushing out of the cliché. It’s really exciting because I haven’t really done anything like this. I’m not going to give anything away, because the more of a surprise it is, the more fun it’s going to be to watch. But we pushed ourselves story-wise to be more unconventional.”
Tartakovsky did not reveal anything about what the first season finale meant for the world in which Primal takes place. Spike and Fang met a woman who can speak in complete sentences and was eventually re-captured onto a slave ship, suggesting Spike and Fang live on an island frozen in time (this would also explain how a caveman and a dinosaur can exist at once). But Genndy says this is NOT leading to an epic confrontation with an evil dictator.
“Whenever you think of Stargate or 10,000 BC, the stories often gravitate to some kind of overlord scenario, some villain with thousands of slaves and that type of thing. I think in my very, very first development of the story of Primal, I had something like that. With a Pharaoh type of situation, but I quickly got away from it.” So what was really going on there? Guess we’ll have to wait and find out.
Season 2 of Primal will debut later this year on Adult Swim; the series is streamable anytime on HBO Max.
