The Brutal Poetry of Genndy Tartakovsky’s “Primal”

The new series on Adult Swim is a beautiful and terrifying exploration of a primordial world.

I’m always on the lookout for a new animated series that I can, if you’ll excuse the expression, sink my teeth into. I haven’t tuned into Adult Swim for a while, so when I read that there was a show on the network that was about a caveman and a dinosaur, and when I watched the trailer, I decided that this was something that I absolutely had to see.

From the very first moment, I knew that I was going to love this show. Part of it, of course, has to do with the animation, which is like almost nothing else that I’ve recently seen. There’s a texture and a richness to it that captures the eye and won’t let go. Just as importantly, there is almost no dialogue, except for some grunts and screams on the part of the caveman and some roars from Fang, and so the image has to convey almost the entirety of both the narrative and the characterizations (except for the excellent score, about which more anon).

Primal is, to be sure, a very pulpy sort of animated series, and it clearly traces its genealogy to such icons of the genre as the Conan stories of yesteryear and various graphic novels (those of Frank Miller come immediately to mind, though thankfully this series…