“If you can get past all the buttholes and balls, it’s pretty heartfelt,” Genndy Tartakovsky says of his new adult animated film Fixed, at the tail end of a first-look presentation at Annecy today, which was full of wild, gleefully crass gags. But the goal wasn’t solely to “gross people out,” he assures, there’s also a mixture of character humor plus some invested sincerity beyond the bizarre vignettes shown. The adult animated comedy follows the canine main character, Bull (Adam Devine), who discovers that the worst is happening: he’s to be neutered the following morning. Fixed follows him across the 24 hours prior, as his friends treat him to one last day out before the operation.
The presentation itself was a compelling mixture of granular details about the production timeline and a loose, relaxed tone that felt almost freeform as it moved quickly through a vast wealth of designs, concepts and other production materials. Tartakovsky and Michelle Murdocca, a producer who has collaborated with him since Hotel Transylvania, told the story of the film through its many iterations since its conception in 2009, around a “dark time” for the filmmaker — first sold as the animal road trip comedy Buds, then The Shift, and then finally, Fixed. As the production timeline gradually caught up to the present day, Tartakovsky noted the unlikely effects that the Covid pandemic had on production in a number of ways — chiefly that the streaming boom opened up more opportunities to sell the film, and also opened the film production itself up to animators working outside of the studio since everyone was working from home regardless.
In the director’s own words, the film is “a unicorn,” and the very first clip shown set out to prove it, in a chaotic sequence of Bull being chased around the house after humping the leg of the family’s Nana, the opening framed like an actual sex scene, complete with shots of quaking furniture before revealing the reality of the situation. In a second and much longer clip, Bull is joined by the boxer Rocco (voiced by Idris Elba), the Daschund Fetch (Fred Armisen), show dog hopeful and Bull’s girl-next-door crush Honey (Kathryn Hahn, who apparently insisted on “brassier,” cruder material for her character) as they convene in the dog park, a mess of canines off the leash to play, bicker and posture.
The result is a mixture of written and visual jokes both raunchy and punny, clever and horrifying; a third clip shows a Lad’s Night Out for dogs which begins with them bloodily mauling a poor squirrel to death. A highlight of the clips that an audience member would later point out is It’s very different tonally to Tartakovsky’s other adult animated works, such as the moodier, more dramatic Primal or more introspective fifth season of Samurai Jack. Fixed is intentionally pushing into new territory for the director, who admitted that it was “ten times harder than any action thing I’ve ever done,” with producers New Line sometimes having to push him into making his jokes “less soft.”
As with the names, the art style of Fixed went through similar iterative changes over time, first envisioned as a 2D hand-drawn feature before turning to CG in order to better sell the film. That changed again, because — in Tartakovsky’s words again — “drawn balls look a lot better than CG balls”. (To emphasize the point, an early CG render of Bull was slowly rotated to show his rear to an appalled and amused audience). More input by various character designers was shown — such as Aaron Springer, Craig Kellman and Stephan De Stefano the former two having collaborated on Samurai Jack and the latter on Primal.
While many of the jokes are based around dogs imitating human behaviors (especially our more base impulses), there’s an insistence that the pooches would use no human gestures — they would “have to follow Lady and the Tramp rules.” (As a sort of punchline to the statement of this visual idea, lots of drawings from Kellman of Bull doing human gestures promptly followed).
“We’re following cartoon rules, it’s old, classic Tex Avery philosophies but in a more contemporary way,” said Tartakovsky, noting the flexibility of the drawings and the film’s general emphasis on expressivity and cartoony elements. To emphasize how those rules inflected upon the film’s comedy, a dialogue scene was broken down into four steps, from Tartakovsky’s boards, to layouts, to animation from Uli Meyer of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? fame, highlighting the emergent humor from these different stages of completion, and the influence of Looney Tunes and Chuck Jones on the long dialogue sequences. On the fourth step, the color stage, Tartakovsky noted that the background art had to prioritize “setting up vignettes for them to act in” with art director Scott Wills (also a collaborator on Samurai Jack and Primal) having to do more subdued work.
That sense of hand-drawn freedom is a priority, and an audience Q&A about references prompted a response about preference for animators discovering things in the drawing, “just straight-up cartooning.” In a film about embracing a sense of freedom before it’s cut short, Fixed is shaping up to be a graphic delight in more ways than one. The film’s production is aiming to wrap this fall, a release date yet to be confirmed.
