Primal Season 2 Will Defy The Action Genre, Says Creator Genndy Tartakovsky

Genndy Tartakovsky is an animator of animators. Over 30 years, the Russian-American animator and director has amassed a career of enviable accolades and creative success, thanks to his work on shows like The Powerpuff Girls and Batman: The Animated Series to his immensely popular original series in the case of Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and Star Wars, Clone Wars.

His latest series Primitive is possibly his boldest yet. In the pulp adventure, a mute caveman known as “Spear” forms an unlikely bond with a tyrannosaurus known as “Fang” while surviving in a fantastical prehistoric world full of deadly creatures. Season 1, which wrapped up last November, earned Tartakovsky a nomination for the 2021 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Show.

Before voting for this year’s Emmy Awards, which ends Monday, August 30, Polygon spoke with Tartakovsky about his inspirations for creating Primitive and what he hopes to accomplish with the show’s upcoming second season.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

The first season of Primitive it feels like a great experiment; It’s 10 episodes of predominantly non-dialogue driven character development and action. What did you learn from the creation of season 1 and how are you going to try harder or change things in season 2?

For us, the first 10 episodes are what we think of as a season. But the second five episodes, once we got through the first five and saw the episodes come to life, we started to realize that we could make stories that were more complex. When you’re doing episodes without dialogue, you’re like, How much can we really transmit through history? And then we realized that there was a lot we could do. So by the second five we start to play with more complex stories, especially in the episode “Coven of the Damned” where we have the flashbacks of everyone’s origins and this really complex emotional thing of babies and loss and death. . It was a lot of fun telling stories that way. We never intended the show to be a “Monster of the Week” show.

You’ve said that Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian series and Frank Frazetta’s paintings were key inspirations for the look of PrimitiveFirst season. What art and stories are inspiring the second season of the show?

The second season is… I don’t know if it’s an exit, but it’s an evolution of what we did in the first season. It feels the same I think, but it is completely different in a way where there is more emotion, a more complex narrative, but still very simple in the sense that there is still no dialogue or very little dialogue like we had it in the first season.

What I got from Robert Howard’s books on Conan and his other writings is that he was a pulp writer in the 1920s. Those were always short stories; trimmed the fat, there is no novel exposition of things. Usually they start with Conan, he is in the desert with a girl, and they meet a creature and have to fight their way out. Those stories really connect with me because we do cartoons, right? So usually they are short. Reading Howard’s work really connected with me because of its concise approach to storytelling because this is a lot of what we do as animators, but with an emphasis on images and no dialogue.

So for the second season, we wanted more; we want it to evolve. We didn’t want to do just 10 more minor variations in season one. This genre has been done a lot. I wanted to do something different and take the genre out of the cliches associated with it as much as we could. And the second season is breaking out of the cliché. It’s really exciting because I haven’t really done anything like this. I’m not giving anything away, because the more surprise it is, the more fun it will be to watch. But we strive in history to be less conventional.

What kinds of clichés do you see in season 2 of Primitive explicitly pushing against?

It’s going to be a bit difficult without revealing anything [laughter]. But let’s see … if we were to raise Primitive In a barbarian adventure, or a sword and sorcery type story, I could live in that world but still get away from the clichés I think. Whenever you think about Stargate or 10,000 BC, the stories often gravitate towards some kind of overlord scenario, some villain with thousands of slaves and that sort of thing. I think in my first development of the history of Primitive, I had something like that. With a pharaoh-like situation, but I quickly walked away from it. It’s like if you take everything from this genre and we had a tendency to go there, because it feels natural. But then you start thinking about all the things that have been done in this genre and you think No, we are just repeating and doing it in our own way, we have to think of something more unique.. That’s all I can say at the moment, however, it’s really hard to say anything else without revealing everything.

Based on what happens at the end of season 1 and where you go in season 2, what do you hope to say through the story of Primitive? What are the general themes that you want to convey to the audience?

I think it has always been survival and evolution. The survival part is easy, right? You just want to live. But the evolution part is complex. And even more so without dialogue, without pontificating in a scene where Spear is sitting and simply saying: “What is my place in the world?”

How do you do that visually? That was what we wanted to do the most. It’s always been about that to some degree, Spear’s evolution as a character. That is what we are focusing on and that is what I wanted to say. At the end of the day, you have these 20 episodes, and what you see there is an evolution.

Primitive Season 1 is available to stream on HBO Max.

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