“Primal” is a life-affirming zombie tale

Genndy Tartakovsky’s “Primal” continues his affinity for pitting his human-sized heroes against gargantuan foes. The historically anachronistic animated epic introduces its neanderthal champion, Spear, and his partner, a female Tyrannosaurus named Fang, as they find common cause in grief. Both lost their families to the same murderous pack of dinosaurs. Both realize that the only way they’ll survive the world’s savagery is to take care of each other.

Throughout their adventures, Spear and Fang defeat or at least outwit enemies much larger than themselves, including a war-hungry Viking clan of enslavers and a tyrannical Egyptian conqueror.

But in his third season return, Spear has been made into a version of the things he once fought. Now he’s the fearsome monster who can’t quite remember the man he used to be.

Spear dies a hero at the second season’s close, only for a shaman to reanimate him in the third season premiere as a zombie. Adversaries impale him. Beasts try to shred him. But Spear is undead, impervious to pain and virtually unkillable, pushed to wander the land searching for Fang and Mira (Laëtitia Eïdo), a Nubian tribeswoman he adores and died defending. The catch is, at this point, he doesn’t recall them specifically — only what they meant to him.

Tartakovsky conveys all of Spear’s torment, loneliness and the magnitude of his love with zero dialogue, only a wide-eyed stare into the distance as he lumbers along, pulled by the memory of an unfinished life.

Magical revivals can take all kinds of forms, as I pointed out to Tartakovsky in a recent conversation. Spear could have come back in any state and as anyone. So why, in this glum post-“Walking Dead” era, awaken our much-loved caveman from a good death to such a miserable half-life?

“The only reason we really did the zombie thing is because we had the strong emotional component to it,” Tartakovsky said. “If you remember something, but you can’t place it, and then you think, ‘Oh, this is familiar to me, so I’m going to do everything in my power to protect it,’ even though we as an audience know what he’s doing, he doesn’t, to a degree.”

Therein lies the hope and tragedy in this latest moving season of “Primal”: “It always comes back to emotion for me,” Tartakovsky said. “I think emotion is the hardest thing to do where you have people care.”

Through Spear’s resurrection, “Primal” is quietly delivering a zombie drama that’s strangely life-affirming, led by a tenderhearted brute who is sensitive to the other voiceless, helpless beings around him. Especially the tiniest ones, like a cricket that reminds him that he was once a protector.

That insect, a central player in the third episode, titled “Feast of Flesh,” gives the amnesiac Spear a purpose. It is so small, delicate and beautiful that he guards it with his life, as he once did for Fang and Mira. This being “Primal,” they’re set upon by a group of diminutive flesh-eaters with jagged teeth, igniting a life-or-death skirmish that, miraculously, steals the viewer’s breath.

“That third episode is probably my favorite,” Tartakovsky said, “because we try not to get captured or captivated by the idea of sexy violence, right? All the shows have fights, and there’s gore and stuff, but we try as hard as we can for all of it to come out of an emotional, character-driven situation.”

(Adult Swim) “Primal”

In this instance, the scene-stealing guest star is an insect fighting beside his much-larger companion to outrun death. Spear is constantly squaring off with overwhelming forces. But in this reversal of fortune, he is the largest opponent, taking it upon himself to defend a dinky innocent from a herd of hunters dwarfed by his size but much larger than the cricket. You may find yourself amazed at the level of emotional investment these scenes elicit, and all over the fate of a bug.

“That’s kind of where I like to think about things, where they come from. That emotional component of him protecting this little grasshopper, cricket thing was everything — like when we hit upon that, it gave us permission to do it all, you know,” Tartakovsky explained, “because it’s not just like, ‘Hey, let’s do a zombie, and then we can have more death and more gore.’ Oh, no.”

Tartakovsky is a legend in the animation world, establishing himself as a Cartoon Network mainstay thirty years ago with “Dexter’s Laboratory,” before helming “Star Wars: Clone Wars,” “Sym-Bionic Titan,” the critically revered “Samurai Jack,” and his 2023 steam-punk flavored fantasy “Unicorn: Warriors Eternal.” Along the way, Tartakovsky also directed three of the four “Hotel Transylvania” films.

But he’s also a master in employing scope and space, especially silence, to add heft to his stories’ stakes. Through “Primal,” Tartakovsky draws inspiration from some of cinema’s greatest live-action filmmakers, including Sergio Leone, to buck convention when it comes to standard ideas about how to propel narratives. His dedication to silence shifts the focus to the art and what Spear does without speaking.

“It’s become a great asset for me, because it’s what I’m known for. But I’m not reinventing the wheel by any means,” he said. “This has been done properly in tons of movies, and it’s just trusting yourself and having the confidence that, yeah, people are going to look at this drawing and not fade away from it.”

Emotion, says Tartakovsky, is the hardest thing to replicate in animation. “How much stuff do you watch, especially in animation, where it’s also fabricated?” he asked. You can watch a good actor, and they can really make you emote, right, because there’s an instant accessibility. But in animation, I always feel like we have to try so much harder, because it’s such an abstraction.”

Snappiness and snark are hallmarks of his earliest series, but eventually Tartakovsky realized that the barrage of dialogue allowed audiences to understand what was going on without feeling it.

Then he found his answer in the live-action classics he venerates, noticing the surge of feeling Leone created by simply letting the camera linger on Clint Eastwood’s face for a few languid beats at points throughout his Westerns.

“Why can’t I do that in animation?” Tartakovsky wondered. “It’s art, right?” So he slowed down his pacing and eased back on emphasizing dialogue in each episode. His award-winning series “Samurai Jack,” for example, hums with long spans of silence.

Artists often streamline what they add to the canvas to highlight the aesthetic splendor in simplicity. So while Tartakovsky’s samurai is a man who only says as much as he must, Spear doesn’t verbalize his thoughts at all. He has a voice, provided by Aaron LaPlante, but communicates with Fang in grunts and bellows. As a zombie, his utterances make him seem beastlier than ever to the other humans he encounters.

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Understanding him requires closely watching what’s unfolding on screen, something few of us currently do. “Especially nowadays, when people watch TV shows — I see my daughter do it all the time. She’s on the phone, and I’m like, ‘How are you watching this?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m listening.’ That’s the level that we’re at! And it drives me crazy.”

The response to this unexpected third season of “Primal” has been passionately positive, especially related to Spear’s internal struggle to regain what made his life worth living. That lonesomeness changes the tension and weight of the story’s silence.

“The hope is the audience cheers for him, right? They root for him,” Tartakovsky concluded. “That’s the best situation I can have as a filmmaker, storyteller, storyteller, that you actually care.” That, and just as importantly, that we give Spear’s improbable odyssey the full attention it deserves.

“Primal” airs at 11:30 p.m. Sundays on Adult Swim and streams the next day on HBO Max.