Good luck trying to find a throughline in Genndy Tartakovsky’s 30-plus-year animation career. His seminal body of TV and film work is eclectic, with each unique project anchored by his innate curiosity. How can he expand the medium’s boundaries and still connect with his audience? For a prime example, take a look at his latest project—an animated R-rated movie about a dog’s last night of freedom before he gets snipped.
Fixed could be just another raunchy romp, but Tartakovsky was interested in the creative possibilities in an adult animated comedy. The hand-drawn art is surprisingly nostalgic, recalling his idols like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, and the style of humor (if not the ribald content) has a charming vintage feel. He defines his comedic sensibility as Mel Brooks meets Peter Sellers meets Blake Edwards. So, while naughty jokes abound, he says: “I personally don’t think I made a filthy movie. That’s the crazy part, because it does have heart.”
The original concept for Fixed dates back more than a decade, when he came up with the idea for a movie featuring characters who were heightened versions of his own friends. “I wanted to bring [their] humor to everybody because they make me laugh so much,” he says. He pitched it in 2010 to an executive at Sony, and she liked where he was going with it but told him it had to be about more than a bunch of guys camping or on a road trip. It needed a concept.
“It was one of those things that rarely happened, but in the room, within a second… lightning struck me,” Tartakovsky says. “I said, well, they’re all dogs, and they find out that one of them is going to get neutered in the morning.” He says this kind of inspiration had never happened to him before, but it worked. Everybody laughed, and they began developing the project. Unfortunately, the executive backing it moved to another studio, a new executive came into the picture, and the project was scrapped.
Tartakovsky, though, wasn’t ready to let it die. “I’d try to sell it somewhere else, do a road show for all the smaller independent studios,” he says. “[But] it was before its time. Adult animation was just starting.”
Fortunately, in 2015, Kristine Belson became President of Sony Pictures Animation and got her hands on the script. She loved it. A few years later, all the pieces fell into place, and the time for Fixed had come.
Moving on Up
Born in Russia, Tartakovsky was just seven when he and his family arrived in the U.S. It was the mid-1970s, and one of his strongest memories is when his dad bought a TV set: ”There was this explosion of animation.” He discovered Bugs Bunny, Popeye, Tom and Jerry, and the Hanna-Barbera classics. “I fell in love with it—really fell in love with it,” he says of the characters and styles that have inspired so much of what he’s created, including a pack of dirty-minded dogs.
He also discovered comic books, buying them off spinner racks at 7-Eleven and using them to learn how to draw little flip books. Then VCRs came along, and “I’m like, oh my God, I could record cartoons and then I could pause them and draw,” he says.
Around the age of 14, two events supercharged the passion that would later drive his career. He saw a revival of The Jungle Book at the theater and was mesmerized by the blend of animation and artistry. And his family took a vacation to Walt Disney World. He came across The Illusion of Life, considered a bible for the art of animation. But this was pre-internet days, and he had never heard of it. He only knew that he wanted it, and it was $30—big bucks back then. “I begged my parents to buy it, and they actually [did], which is kind of shocking,” he says. “We didn’t have a lot of money.” He spent the entire drive back to Chicago reading the book, “and every page made me so excited. I wanted to create movement more than anything.”
Despite how much he loved animation, he applied to Columbia College Chicago for film and video, thinking he would do storyboards for commercials and his own indie projects on the side. But when he signed up for classes, the art courses he needed were full. There was, though, an available elective: animation.
[Genndy] breaks down every aspect of his cartoons into rhythmic, musical beats. Every cut and camera move, down to each gesture or eye blink, is precisely timed… To me this visual musicality is what sets his shows apart from others.—Craig McCracken
“I walked into the class, and as soon as I saw the animation desks… I switched my major,” he says. “I always joke that the animation gods [have been] guiding me somewhere through this whole [journey].”
Influenced by the careers of Disney’s Nine Old Men, the studio’s legendary animators, Tartakovsky figured his path would look similar: “I’ll assist some animator, maybe Don Bluth for 10 years. Then I’ll become an animator, do that for [another] 20, and then maybe get a chance to be a director.”
It wasn’t until he transferred to California’s CalArts in 1990 to major in Character Animation that he began thinking differently. “I was very critical of the things that I liked, what was bad, what was good,” he says. “That’s when I really started to form an idea—if I had a chance to work on something I would like, what would that be?”
The answer began to emerge with Changes, his second-year student film. He’d been drawing a tall, skinny girl, and he loved animating her dancing. He wanted to use her in some way. He was interested in the contrast of characters, and he asked himself: What’s the opposite of this girl? “A little box of a brother who’s a scientist,” he says. “She can come in and play with his inventions and try to ruin him. That’s literally how it happened. It all started from movement.”
Changes contained seeds of elements that are now signature Tartakovsky. Friend and fellow CalArts’ student, Craig McCracken—who was working on his own project that would eventually become The PowerPuff Girls—says they were driven by a shared love of visual storytelling, bold design, and iconic characters. “Genndy is a master animation director and visual storyteller,” he adds. “He breaks down every aspect of his cartoons into rhythmic, musical beats. Every cut and camera move, down to each gesture or eye blink, is precisely timed… To me this visual musicality is what sets his shows apart from others.”
Double-Edged Swords
Tartakovsky’s student film about the boxy little boy named Dexter landed him a job as a Storyboard Artist on Hanna-Barbera’s 2 Stupid Dogs. “But the producer hated my storyboarding,” he says. “It was really hard on me. I have a very strong point of view, and here’s your boss telling you that what you’re doing is wrong.”
While this criticism made him question his artistic sensibility, it didn’t slow him down. He left the show to work as an Animation Timer on The Critic around the same time Cartoon Network was starting its “What a Cartoon!” animated shorts series. Meanwhile, Larry Huber, a different producer from 2 Stupid Dogs, showed the Dexter student film to Cartoon Network. They asked Tartakovsky to work up a seven-minute pilot.
He explains that in the shorts program, “you live and die by your own sword. [They’re] not going to give you notes. You just do what you do, and it’s either going to be good or not.” He was only 24 and didn’t know anyone his age running a show, so he storyboarded the pilot thinking that it would be a good reel to get another job. “Then, of course, the rest was history,” he says.
That history, Dexter’s Laboratory, aired as part of Cartoon Network’s new shorts showcase in 1995, and it became the first original series for the channel’s Cartoon Cartoons programming. From there Tartakovsky went on to work as a Director and Producer on McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls. McCracken, in turn, was a Storyboard Artist, Art Director, and Director on Dexter’s Laboratory. These collaborations were a natural result of their time together at CalArts where “students organically start sharing ideas,” says McCracken. “Whenever Genndy might need some design or gag ideas, he would come to me, and when I needed some help with animation or storyboards, I would go to him. This dynamic grew over time and became the way we worked together.”
As his time on PowerPuff was coming to an end, Tartakovsky found himself veering in a new direction. He knew he wanted his next project to be different from what he’d done on Dexter’s and PowerPuff, which had abundant dialogue and art with thick black outlines. He says he spent a lot of time complaining about Western action animation—not just about what was wrong with it, but about how he’d do it differently. “Finally, I’m like, maybe I need to do an action show,” he says.
One thing I noticed time and again was [Genndy’s] ability to stick to his guns and protect his vision against weird studio notes … where good and bold ideas are slowly ground down into something bland and derivative.—Bryan Andrews
A big fan of samurai and ninja culture, Tartakovsky landed on his next subject matter. But because it was going to be a kids show, he had to figure out how to do action with a sword that would be suitable for a young age group—meaning, no blood. “The idea came to me that I could dismember and kill robots and substitute oil for blood,” he says. That’s how Samurai Jack began, followed by the concept of transporting Jack to the future where he could logically fight said robots.
For the look, “I was a big UPA fan,” he says, referencing the midcentury animation studio behind classics like the visually graphic Rooty Toot Toot. “I thought, could I do an action show that feels like a UPA cartoon?” In what would become a familiar move—throwing down the gauntlet for himself—he started drawing. “I wanted a very graphic approach and basically boiled down the concept,” he explains. White colors for the good guy, black colors for the bad guy, and red colors for the background. He pitched it as a highly-stylized action show with lots of action and minimal dialogue.
“One thing I noticed time and again was [Genndy’s] ability to stick to his guns and protect his vision against weird studio notes … where good and bold ideas are slowly ground down into something bland and derivative,” says Bryan Andrews, who worked as a Writer and Story Artist on Samurai Jack, as well as Primal and Sym-Bionic Titan, on which he was also a Co-Creator. “He doesn’t ever lose sight of the radness, the potential, the kick ass, the cinema… The shows and characters he’s created over the years have had a major impact and influence on generations.”
This is especially true of Samurai Jack. In its original incarnation, it went on to win a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program and three Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation. Not only did it make a massive leap from the heavy “cartoony” lines of Dexter’s Laboratory, but its style also showcases Tartakovsky’s flexibility as an artist. The artwork, in fact, had no outlines at all, and that, along with the abstract backgrounds and inventive camera angles, changed ideas about what was possible with animation.
Quiet on the Set
Samurai Jack was followed by writing, directing, and executive producing Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and Tartakovsky was on a roll. But when he made a different kind of risky move, founding Orphanage Animation Studios, it was 2008, in the heart of a recession. The studio’s efforts to sell feature films weren’t successful, and because they needed the work, Tartakovsky’s team decided to come up with a series. They sold Sym-Bionic Titan to Cartoon Network, but it was canceled after 20 episodes, and his studio folded. “It was a low point for me in my career,” he says.
Not sure what to do next, he told Sony: “If you guys need any help, I’m available.” At that time, the studio had been working for years on a Dracula movie for kids. He was asked to take a look. “I went home, wrote two pages of jokes and ideas, came back the next day, [and] told them what I would do with the movie,” he says. Sony liked his concepts, which incorporated his love of classic 2D animation and influences like his beloved Tex Avery. He was hired, going on to leave his distinctive aesthetic imprint on the Hotel Transylvania franchise, directing the first three films, writing on the third, and writing and executive producing on the fourth.
The Hotel Transylvania movies were a major achievement for Tartakovsky. They showed that he could pivot from TV to film and helm a successful franchise. They also proved his versatility, especially when he made a detour between the second and third films—a mature version of Samurai Jack for Adult Swim, which premiered in 2017 and ran for 10 episodes. Leaving kids animation “released us to do more sophisticated storytelling [and] character development,” he says.
This project for an adult audience also stirred new ambitions. He noticed that when he got feedback on the new Samurai Jack, the parts people found most powerful were those without dialogue. “I thought, can I connect all the no-dialogue sequences and make an actual show?” he says. “That was Primal. That was the spark.”
On paper, Primal seems improbable: an animated prehistoric action/horror/fantasy buddy show about a Neanderthal and a Tyrannosaurus rex … with not one single conversation. But by this point it was clear that Tartakovsky was driven by creating his own artistic challenges.
“Working with Genndy over the years, I love that he wants a different look for every project,” says Scott Wills, the Art Director on Fixed who also worked with him on Samurai Jack, Primal, and Hotel Transylvania 3. “He loves art and bold design. Artistically, he’s not afraid to take risks, especially if it increases the impact of the story.”
Working with Genndy over the years, I love that he wants a different look for every project.—Scott Wills
In the case of Primal, Tartakovsky asked himself: “Without dialogue, can the emotionality and the characters stand out more than the violence and the sexy action?” he says. “Let me see if I can get people to really care.” In fact, he could. Winning both Annie and Emmy awards, Primal debuted in 2019 and is still running, evidence once again that being very opinionated—Tartakovsky’s own words—pays off.
While Tartakovsky has a reputation for knowing what he wants to accomplish and standing his ground to do so, he also learned from his early career experience how to express his goals without discounting the creativity around him. “I often sat in on Genndy’s animation review sessions,” says Wills. “It’s absolutely fascinating to watch him adjust the timing or movement to improve a joke or just get more energy into a scene.”
Robert Alvarez, who directed on Dexter’s Laboratory and worked on most of Tartakovksy’s other shows including Samurai Jack, says one of Tartakovsky’s rare qualities is the ability to provide candid yet respectful guidance. “He would explain to you why he changed your direction, and you would see what he wanted,” says Alvarez, adding that he also organized crew lunches to bring everyone together. “He made working on any of his shows seem like you belonged to a family, Genndy’s family.”
Tartakovsky has five Emmys, three Annies, and a Winsor McKay Award under his belt, but he’s hardly ready to rest on these laurels. So, what’s next? “A true action drama,” he says. “A Gladiator or something like that. That’s the barrier I want to break—a big theatrical, cinematic experience, but animation.”
Now he just needs to sell it. The people he’s pitched it to so far haven’t been able to figure out the audience—or as Tartakovsky says: “They can’t do the math on the widgets.” But if there’s been one constant in his career, it’s finding people who know that his unconventional vision is well worth the risk. “I’m looking for a champion who can believe in what I do,” he says. Given Tartakovsky’s tenacity when it comes to a challenge, and the success that has brought, no doubt that champion is right around the corner.
Dexter’s Laboratory images courtesy of Cartoon Network Studios. Samurai Jack images courtesy of Cartoon Network Studios. Hotel Transylvania franchise images courtesy © 2012 Sony Pictures Animation Inc. Primal images courtesy of Cartoon Network Studios. Fixed images courtesy of NETFLIX © 2025.
