This Must-See Action Series With 100% on RT Is the Best Animated Project on Max

In 2019, Adult Swim began airing the first season of Primal, an animated series from Genndy Tartakovsky, the creator of Samurai Jack and the Hotel Transylvania franchise.

It's a brutal story about a caveman and a female T-Rex who both lose their children to attacks by the terrifying predator and are brought together by their shared loss.

What Is Primal About?

According to the plot, the main character, who has lost his family, tries to survive in a dangerous world inhabited by predatory dinosaurs.

Unexpectedly, he teams up with a female Tyrannosaurus who lost her brood to the same pack of predators that killed his wife and child. Together they try to track down the dinosaurs and take revenge.

Primal Is the Statement of an Outstanding Director

The first season of Primal felt like an act of desperate animal roar by Genndy Tartakovsky, an outstanding animation director who had been a hostage of the corporate system for many years. He made Hotel Transylvania in the hope of realizing his dream project – an animation based on the story of Popeye the Sailor Man – but its production was canceled.

Tartakovsky poured out his accumulated anger into a project that was completely uncommercial. Written without a single line of dialogue, gloriously cruel, drawn entirely by hand in an edgy style.

Primal Tells a Profound Story Without a Single Word

Primal is unlike anything else in the world of modern animation. Where others strive for expressive maximalism, where there is always something happening on the screen, Tartakovsky strips away everything unnecessary. The author needs nothing but rough brushstrokes and a furious roar.

All the drama fits into the primitive expressions of minimalist faces, precise moments of silence and sharp flashes of graphic violence. Samurai Jack already showed how good the director is at animated action, but in Primal Tartakovsky leaps over his head and builds a narrative exclusively in the language of action.

Primal manages to present an emotional drama about identity crisis, love and betrayal using the expressive means of prehistoric primates.

In Primal, there is not a hint of corporate pretense, not a single prefabricated template. Just as the characters search for something incomprehensible, Tartakovsky himself never stops finding new ways to express the inexpressible with the tools available only to animation.

Primal is Tartakovsky's main masterpiece so far. Not a single filler episode like in Samurai Jack, no producers hanging over his head. A pure authorial statement without compromise: at the same time very personal and made as a breathtaking genre attraction.