Genndy Tartakovsky Knows ‘Fixed' Is a ‘Unicorn' of an Animated Movie
'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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In Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the stage prequel to the events of Stranger Things the series, audience members have shared it's now established canon that back in high school, Joyce and Hopper investigated an unusual happening in their town involving Victor Creel (Henry Creel's father), the real truth of which was left unsolved. Hopper went on to leave to become a big city cop, and in his flashbacks we see his tragic backstory of having lost his daughter to cancer. Seeing Joyce's relentlessness to find out what happened to Will is something Hopper recognizes and shares—seeing finding Will as a path to do what he couldn't and save her kid. It seems that as things get worse, the rest of the grownups in town would just rather keep ignoring the bad things happening around them. Barb (Shannon Purser) goes missing, and there's no rush to look for her from anyone but Nancy (Natalia Dyer), who, like her brother Mike, gets the sense that something is off about her friend's disappearance after Will's. From the start, Hawkins feels like a small town where most people are miserable, and it could be by supernatural design, as the apathy from the adults rivals the meanness of the kids and teens as they all gawk at Joyce. There's no justice for Barb as her disappearance is dismissed as another runaway, with the added detail of her car being planted by a bus stop. Nancy begins to run her own investigation concurrent with Joyce and Hopper's, while the younger kids go on their main character storyline. Could the Upside Down already be feeding off the energy to expand beneath their feet? It seems likely that this is what leads to the fabric between both worlds getting ripped so the Demogorgon can feed on the most vulnerable. Eleven's (Millie Bobbie Brown) escape from Hawkins Lab as Will is taken sets her up as the hero the town needs. When El joins Mike, Lucas, and Dustin on their search for Will her powers quickly get revealed. It starts off simple enough, like Carrie meets E.T. El makes a kid who picks on her friends at their friend's fake funeral pee himself, and later makes other kids fly with the wave of her hand. As she learns to channel her powers to make contact with Will in the Upside Down, it raises the stakes of the mystery. And it's not so clean-cut because Lucas is the first to question her involvement with Hawkins Lab, while Mike's protectiveness over her shadows his doubts. Her superhuman strength is dangerous and something the bad men want her back for. They figure out it's to use as a weapon, but against what? The Hawkins Lab agents, led by Brenner (Matthew Modine), attempt to cover up Will's death by staging a fake dead body that gets all the way to the morgue. Hopper gets in and cuts it open to find it's stuffed. Joyce already knows, because by then she's been in touch with Will through Christmas lights from the Upside Down. The pain of her loss, you could argue, might be what begins to lure the Demogorgon through her walls. The blinking lights become the thread of how to know something is coming through. Hopper and Joyce uncover that the kid who was described as having a shaved head near the scene of a crime could have been the child of a pregnant woman who was experimented on during Brenner's time with MK Ultra. When El/Jane was born, Brenner took the child back to Hawkins Lab, presumably to see how the psychedelics affected her child. Her powers were developed and tested in the lab, as seen in flashbacks where she refers to Brenner as Papa. In season one, things are left very vague in regard to how much MK Ultra was truly involved with Eleven's origin. Stranger Things: The First Shadow, however, fills in canon for that lore, which will likely be revealed in season five. Nancy and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) piece together that Barb's blood is what the Demogorgon caught the scent of to pull her into the Upside Down. In Jonathan's photography, they see its slender and misshapen face lurking behind Barb, and it matches Joyce's description of the creature coming through the walls. They know blood lures it and both teens decide to fight back against it. Nancy's interest in investigative journalism is born here, and it sets her up to be more than the small town girl who stays with her high school jock sweetheart. The jock in question, Steve (Joe Keery), surprisingly goes from leading the crowd of disaffected youth to abandoning it when he begins to listen to Nancy. His lines deliver clues to the idea that the town exists in this sort of fog and when he turns on his bully friends, it's because he realizes that Nancy cares about others—and he wants to, too. When the showdown at the Byers home is getting set up Steve shows up to make amends at Jonathan's doorstep for having thought that Nancy was cheating on him. Which, thanks to the timing and the blood on his face for making fun of the Byers family earlier, is exactly what makes the Demogorgon attack them all. It's very Nightmare on Elm Street and Nancy gets an Alien-style Ripley action hero moment while the two guys vying for her attention fend off the monster. They hear Joyce and Hopper on the other side looking for Will and realize the electromagnetic veil is thinning (the lights be blinking!). Joyce and Hopper find Will, and he's absorbed onto a wall by the tendrils of the Upside Down's alternate reality Hawkins. The consequences of Hopper's trade to be let into the Upside Down from the lab give up Eleven's location at the school. There the kids had helped her tap into the Upside Down to look for Will and Barb. Sadly, Barb was discovered mostly consumed by the nightmare realm. When the agents arrive and attack Eleven and her friends, she pops the brains of those who raised guns at them, and all that blood sets off the Demogorgon's hunger. Here we see Brenner get dragged away, indicating that the Demogorgon is collecting as many people alive for the hive walls of the Upside Down. In order to close the seal, Eleven realizes she's the only one powerful enough to keep it where it belongs and goes in with it to save everyone. Hopper's guilt leads him to try to help through waffle drops , hoping the Eggo scent will lead her back. Will's recovery after his ordeal seemingly goes well for a few months after his rescue. He gets caught up on everything he's missed and seems like a normal boy. Jonathan goes over to Mike and Nancy's to escort him home, but things aren't what they appear. Will hacks out a small slug and keeps it secret that he's still somehow tethered to the Upside Down through his mind. The cliffhanger is just a tease of the places the show eventually goes—the drama of season one centered Will's disappearance and raised Eleven to main character status going forward, but the Upside Down may have sown a seed that may finally pay off in the final season. Are there any details we missed that you think will come back around in season five? Let us know in the comments below. In a month we'll be back with the next Hellfire Club Catch-Up, digging into Stranger Things season two. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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The Sandman Season 2 Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out?
Nope, this is not just a dream. The Sandman is truly back as Morpheus AKA Dream sets out to make things right once and for all. While it's big return also comes with some bittersweet news—the show's second season will also be its last—it is also changing some things up from what we're used to seeing from our favorite Netflix shows. Ready to step back into dream world? Here's everything you need to know about The Sandman season 2's release schedule. The Sandman officially returned for its second season on July 3, 2025! That's nearly three years after the first season came out. You might have noticed that Netflix only dropped six episodes of the season during the premiere day. Like some of our bigger faves (hey, Stranger Things!) this series is being released in parts. The Sandman season 2 will consist of 12 episodes that are split into three different parts. Episodes 1-6 were all released on July 3. Fans will then have to wait until July 24, 2025 for episodes 7-11. But that still leaves episode 12, AKA the big finale, which will be released on its own on July 31, 2025.
