2 days ago
Genndy Tartakovsky Knows ‘Fixed' Is a ‘Unicorn' of an Animated Movie
Having worked on the project for 15 years, Genndy Tartakovsky is fully aware that his latest film, 'Fixed,' is an anomaly. Here is a raunchy, capital R-rated 2D animated comedy about a dog having one last wild night out on the town before getting neutered in the morning and losing his precious family jewels. Despite having several acclaimed shows and a highly successful animated film trilogy in his resume, Tartakovsky's 'Fixed' could have easily not made it to the screen — and it almost didn't several times.
'I've always said this movie is a unicorn,' Tartakovsky told IndieWire ahead of the film's release at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. 'It's a dream come true to have a 2D animated, hand-drawn, R-rated movie that doesn't rely on pop culture humor. It's very rare.'
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He is not wrong. Though on the surface, it'd be easy to dismiss 'Fixed' as this year's 'Sausage Party,' another animated movie that used the medium's endless visual possibilities to give audiences extremely graphic imagery. For Tartakovsky, who has worked primarily in the all-ages space for the past 30 years, even when he's moved to R-rated animation, he's never written this kind of humor before. Sure, 'Samurai Jack' has humor, but it's never raunchy, and 'Primal' has plenty of graphic imagery, but it's kind of lacking in the buttholes and testicles department compared to this movie. For the director, it was a challenge to have to change his sensibilities and make sure exactly where he wanted the movie to go. 'It can't be just straight dialogue all the way through,' Tartakovsky explained. 'It's my sensibility, it has to have some physicality.'
That physicality comes in the form of striking, exaggerated, and caricatured animation straight out of the golden age of Chuck Jones and Tex Avery cartoons. For Tartakovsky, who fell in love with that style of animation growing up, it was a dream. 'I've been studying it for so long,' he said. 'It's part of me and it's informed my style.' Whether it's the slapstick humor of 'Dexter's Laboratory,' or the use of silence in storytelling in 'Samurai Jack' or even the way he uses Bugs Bunny-type physicality in non-comedy projects like 'Clone Wars,' Tartakovsky has brought an old-school sensibility to every project he's worked on, but 'Fixed' feels like the culmination of it. Though there is no squash and stretch, exactly, there is a shared sense of physical humor and slapstick in Golden Age cartoons and a sight gag of a pack of dogs chasing a squirrel and cutting to them tearing the poor creature to bloody bits.
Having worked with French studio La Cachette for his last two projects, 'Fixed' was also new territory for Tartakovsky in the form of a new team of animators working to bring that Avery and Jones vibe to 'Fixed.' Despite working in the industry for decades, the caliber of his collaborators intimidated the creator. 'I don't get to animate as much, so when all of a sudden I'm working with great animators, I get in my head and think they'll see that I'm a fake because I've only done my own stuff for so long,' Tartakovsky said. 'I had Disney animators on my team — one of our guys worked on 'Roger Rabbit,' and he's incredible, so am I really going to give him direction? He can out-animate me at any time.' According to Tartakovsky, it ended up not being an issue. 'It was the most minimal amount of notes we've ever done on a film. It was never about the technical side of animation, I'd just talk to them about the joke and they got it right away.'
Behind the sex jokes lies a rather heartfelt story of a group of friends trying to cheer up one of their own, and even a sweet romantic story. Possibly the most surprisingly tender, yet still very funny, subplot in the film involves Lucky, a neurotic dog obsessed with weird smells and tastes, learning to love himself after an encounter with Frankie, an intersex dog voiced by River Gallo.
'Everyone was holding their breath, asking if I was sure I wanted to include that,' Tartakovsky said. 'I thought, why not? It's funny and we're not making fun of it. We want to be sincere about it and not mean.' Indeed, there's a sincerity in the way Gallo voices Frankie that makes the humor of their big scene also become a moment of personal triumph, of acceptance, and also funny dog sex. 'Hiring a voice actor who is part of that community added a lot to it. Sometimes I'd do something and they'd explain why it could be misinterpreted because I don't have that perspective, so they'd explain it to me, and then I'd change it up. We worked our way through the whole movie like that.'
Preventing the raunchiness from drowning the heart, and the heart from mellowing out the humor, was a balance critical to crafting the film. 'We're trying to build characters that we really like and that are funny,' Tartakovsky said. 'That's really hard to do from scratch in an original story.' It doesn't help that it's a feature, as, unlike TV, you can't just build on happy accidents from one episode to the next. Cracking the right balance took years and several variations of the script. Part of the beauty, but also the problem, of writing for animation is that something that works well on the page, or even with a specific art style, doesn't necessarily translate to another visual style. At one point, Tartakovsky was pressured into trying out 3D animation to sell the film more easily, but that had an unexpected effect on the film. 'Animated balls look better in 2D.'
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