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My Essay on Genndy Tartakovsky

Genndy Tartakovsky

Genndy Tartakovsky is an animator, storyboard artist, producer, director and screenwriter, he is most famous for the cartoon network series’ Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2003). I grew up on Tartakovsky’s work without even knowing it, I only recently found out that this is the man who partially inspired me throughout my childhood.

One of my favourite Tartakovsky projects is Dexter’s Laboratory, Known for its simple style and, in my opinion, it’s very interesting characters, Dexter’s Laboratory tells the classic story of a mad scientist constantly trying to invent new creations and most of the time failing but this time it comes with a twist, the scientist is very young boy, he’s supposedly around 8 years old, interestingly Dexter’s Russian accent is a reference to Genndy himself as when he was a young boy he had a very harsh Russian accent.

In terms of style and feel, Dexter’s Laboratory was heavily inspired by the classic cartoons of the late 1940s and 1950s. the character designs of Dexter and his supporting cast were very from an approximation of actual human anatomy, a huge difference from what people were used to at the time, the design was quiet close to the aesthetic used by Hanna-Barbera cartoons combined with the fact that the each episode was split in to 7 minute segments telling a new story each segment and because of this the show had to rely on slapstick violence and gags similar to tom and jerry and the looney tunes actually . It carried this out incredibly well.

For example, the episode ‘The big cheese’ told us a story where Dexter wanted to learn how to speak French but after something wrong in his attempt Dexter woke up only being able to say one thing “Omelette du fromage.” The episode then takes us through Dexter’s whole day which leads to some typically absurd moments, you would think after a while this gag would get old but somehow it managed to stay fresh all throughout the episode, Of course, the thing that really upset Dexter was the fact that he couldn’t get in to his voice activated computer as the password was ‘Star Wars’ and Dexter’s attempts to access the computer resulted in a huge explosion. This combination of effective storytelling, classic humour was exactly the type of thing Dexter Laboratory is still remembered for to this day.

Another very famous animated series’ that Tartakovsky had a part to play in was Power Puff Girls, this show was amazing, I would call this show one of favourite animated series of all time, the brilliantly vibrant colours, the fantastic, gorgeous, simplistic style of all the characters and the classic archetypes used, it all culminates in the perfect kids show.

I especially loved the designs of the villains, they were all so obviously inspired by classic Saturday morning cartoon villains and the characterisations echo this.

The episodes that Tartakovsky directed were complex and added a lot more to the characters, for example the episode ‘Mr. Mojo Rising’ in which Mo Jo Jo Jo captures the professor in hopes to lure the Power Puffs in to a trap, in this episode Mo Jo discovers that he was the one that caused the accident that created The Power Puff Girls, his greatest enemies, but the interesting thing about this episode is that Mo Jo manages to defeat the girls. This episode adds so much to the character of Mo Jo Jo by making him find out the truth, and the fact that he defeats the girls means that Tarkovsky was tired of seeing the heroes win and in turn this adds a fresh new take in the story of good vs evil.

Genndy once said “For me, animation is the caricature of life. It's something that we create, from the ground up” I think that that this is a beautiful statement and truly shows the real passion behind every one of Tarkovskys projects, he fully delves in to all of his projects because he genuinely loves his work.

When Tartakovsky was done with Dexter’s Laboratory and Power Puff Girls he decided to go with something much different and introduced us to the ultra-stylized action series that would reinvigorate Tartakovsky’s career and proof to the world that he could truly do anything ‘Samurai Jack’ but that wasn’t why the animator decided to do this new style, the reason that Samurai Jack was so cinematic and far from his original style was so that he didn’t want to do dialog, he was clearly burned out after the various comedy’s was known for.

Tartakovsky would never take on two projects at once, he is of the believe that you cant fully put yourself in to two at once “Whenever you're doing two things at once, you're compromising them both” I completely agree with this statement, you should allows focus on one project before moving on to the next, if you complete a project and receive criticism you can work on that in your next project but if you work on two projects at a time you wont be able to consider critiques.

I've always loved Samurai Jack and Dexter's Laboratory, but I especially loved his version of Star Wars: The Clone Wars due to his incredible style and all the interesting ways he showed the conflict within the characters using colours and style, for example in the scene where Anakin Skywalker fights the assassin Assajj Ventress, with each clash of their sabres, a flash of some of Anakin's masters shows an expression of despair and disappointment.

Not only was he skilled with stylistic animation but he is also skilled in script writing and foreshadowing events, at one point during the aforementioned duel Assajj states to Anakin “your fall will be my ascension to the Sith”, it turns out that her literal fall was another step on his journey to become the dark lord Darth Vader, If this was unclear to the casual watcher, it was made obvious by the mood, lighting, music, and visuals of the scene. It’s entirely unmistakable that this was meant to be a turning point for Anakin Skywalker, another testament to the skill of Tartakovsky.

Getting this series off the ground was no easy feat and is quite an interesting story, the idea came together from conversations between Lucasfilm and Cartoon Network, when Tartakovsky was offered the project he of course said although there was a small problem, Lucasfilm wanted the series to consist of one minute episodes so Tartakovsky told cartoon network that he couldn't really do anything significant with one-minute episodes-it's simply too short a time to tell a story. Cartoon Network went back to Lucasfilm and relayed the message and told them that they would be working with the team behind Samurai Jack, it turns out that George Lucas watches and really admires Samurai Jack, so they sent word that they now would be allowed three-minutes for each episode. When they got the word back from Lucasfilm, he still wasn’t sure that three minutes would be enough to tell a story.

So he took several existing 22-minute episodes of Samurai Jack and re-edited them into three-minute versions to see if it would work. He wanted to know that in three minutes you could make sense, capture the viewer's interest and still tell a compelling story. He found that this worked surprisingly well, particularly when each instalment worked to build upon the previous one, to offer an important piece to the overall story.

The series won three Emmy awards two for Outstanding Animated Program and another for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation

Even though Tartakovsky is incredibly well known due to his success in traditional drawn animation he has recently done a lot of work in 3d animation, he has directed all the movies in the hotel Transylvania franchise including a short film based in the universe called ‘Puppy’. Hotel Transylvania is a movie franchise where we follow Dracula, after his wife is killed by an angry human mob he decides to open a hotel as a haven to all other monsters, most importantly his daughter.

Tarkovskys main priority for all projects is the audience, he uses everything in his arsenal to make sure the audience is fully immersed in the worlds he creates “The computer is designed to mimic reality. And in an animated world, in my perspective, that's the worst thing to do. I want people to walk into a movie theatre and be transported to a different world”

Tartakovsky has also worked on the 2016 3d animated movie ‘Trolls’, Trolls is about a group of happy little creatures who due to various things are forced to go on an adventure to protect their people, I have never seen the movie but after reading the synopsis for the film it seems to be, just another Smurfs, Tartakovsky much prefers his movie projects to his television projects simply because he loves being in the audience with everyone else rather than going home and hearing what people thought later, “Watching a movie with an audience is so exciting. For me, coming from TV, you finish an episode and then it airs, and I'm at home. There's no gratification and there's no audience interaction with it”

In 2010 Tartakovsky was inspired to create a new series in the vein of speed racer and battle of the planets “I started messing around with this idea for a show about a robot, but he's disguised as a human in high school” the goal was to place a character with almost no emotion into the most highly intense emotional situation that we can all relate to, and see what comes out of it.

Like all of us when Tartakovsky was a child he always loved the idea of a kid in a giant robot, because we knew we weren’t tough on our own but if we had a giant robot we wouldn’t have to be tough.

Earlier in his career Tartakovsky worked as an assistant animator, storyboard artist and in between artist on a lot of very famous series’ such as Cow and chicken, Tiny Toon Adventures and my personal favourite series of all time Batman: The Animated Series which of course follows the adventures of the much beloved hero The Batman, he is also credited as supervising producer for The Grim adventures of Billy & Mandy and a timing director for Steven Universe but only for the pilots of these two shows.

I believe the most important part of any television show or movie is the heart, any time you watch anything from Genndy Tartakovsky you feel the heart and all the love that pours in to everything he produces, when there is no love in a project you can really tell, and it almost feels cold and robotic.

I have gone in to detail about a lot of Tarkovskys work but what about the projects that didn’t come through the ones that were left in the dark, that had some amazing potential, in 2013 Genndy Tartakovsky was planning an animated short based on the very famous superhero ‘Superman’, he was working on this project with Scott Willis the plans were unfortunately scrapped but not before some concept art was made, and the images are truly beautiful, they were quiet different from what were used to with the iconic hero, the images suggest that it would have been a sort of bleak story, the opportunity eventually came back to Genndy and his team but the agreement had lessened and over time it continue to lessen until there was nothing left, we only have two images to go off but if Tartakovsky was at the helm, this could have been the Superman story we have been waiting for.

Recently Tartakovsky was working on a new ‘Pop Eye’ movie based on the iconic character for Sony, but the production company got “cold feet” and pulled the sure success from production, this surely would have been an amazing return for the character that we may never get now, but Sony are continuing to work with the legendary animator so as long as the company don’t make another one of their purely idiotic mistakes we will still get to see Genndy’s passion project and original idea ‘Can You Imagine’ which sounds like a fantastic beautiful tale about a boy and his imagination.

In conclusion Genndy Tartakovsky is a very well-rounded animator, with a plethora of incredible, inspiring, life changing work under his belt. Before this essay my knowledge was very limited on this man, however now I that I have deeply researched his work I have learned so much about his process and the inventive ways that he would test things, I am now very interested in Genndy Tartakovsky and I would like to look in to his work and take in all the inspiration I possibly can.

http://www.azquotes.com/author/87771-Genndy_Tartakovsky

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/z49d9e/you-can-thank-genndy-tartakovsky-for-the-cartoon-network-holy-trinity

http://www.slashfilm.com/genndy-tartakovsky-superman-concept-art/

https://jonnegroni.com/2015/03/13/why-the-ruler-of-my-childhood-just-got-kicked-off-the-new-popeye-movie/

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