ONE MAN AND HIS THEROPOD
What happens after the Covid19 lockdown ends? The apocalyptic Cassandras seem to think we’ll all be living in a dog-eat-dog world. Cooler heads believe the world will certainly be changed in significant ways as far as economics and sociology are concerned.
Both sides tend to look to the past to find ways of navigating the future, but how far back should we go? To before the internet, social media, Amazon and Apple, or further still to some agrarian pre-Industrial Revolution Utopia?
What if we could turn the clock back to the very beginning and reset everything from the dawn of humanity — hopefully in a more idealistic manner than the cynical, violent vision of that era provided in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Well, have no fear because, as we look around for the reset button and figure out a way to re-programme the whole damn business, Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky presents his short, sharp and brutal animated series
Primal — a gory, elegantly simple, poignant and not-for-kids imagining of what human life at the beginning of everything may have been and could return to now on some levels.
Easily consumed in just under two hours, the five-part series is a masterful exercise in demonstrating the power of images, music and ambient sound to tell an effective and bloody tale of life in the primitive TRex, giant snake, flying devil bat and velociraptor-infested landscape of the land before time.
Our heroes are Spear — a big chunk of caveman named after his Stone Age weapon, who’s left on his own after a tragedy, and Fang, his curmudgeonly Tyrannosaurus rex companion, also orphaned under tragic circumstances. The odd pair are thrown together by similar diets and circumstances and left to navigate their way through an increasingly frightening and lifethreatening series of predator encounters in which they learn to put aside their differences and develop a mutually beneficial, if somewhat prickly, bromance.
Tartakovsky’s thick-lined drawing style and sparse backgrounds combine with his particular talent for conveying action through the smart use of basic principles to create something that’s thrilling and brutal but also allows occasional pauses to laugh at the expense of its perplexed adventurers or for empathetic reflection of the big questions facing them.
As their relationship develops over the course of their close-shave encounters with hungry monsters roaming the plains, Tartakovsky’s characters — with their emotive visual quirks and in spite of their silence — draw you in and make you care and root for them wholeheartedly.
In a world populated with digital noise and misspelled opinions, that’s no small feat.
Don’t be misled — nobody wants to return to a world full of carnivorous monsters, where staying alive is the order of every day — but it’s nice to think that if we had to, there’d still be some basic humanity left in us somewhere that might ensure that we wouldn’t all turn into bone-wielding psychopaths.
’Primal’ is available on Showmax