How the late-night TV block Adult Swim’s ‘Primal’ wound up in Oscar contention

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the 32 films vying for a coveted Oscar nomination in the animated feature category, one film, “Genndy Tartakovsky’s ‘Primal’ — Tales of Savagery,” stood out. “It was originally pitched as a short inspired by the pulp fiction of Robert E. Howard but Mike Lazzo said they saw it as a movie and a television show,” says creator-director Genndy Tartakovsky, whose work includes the popular series “Samurai Jack” and the “Hotel Transylvania” franchise, which has grossed over $1 billion at the box office and has a fourth film in the works. Then I remembered this idea I had about a kid riding a dinosaur.” With a fresh take, the director aged the child into an adult prehistoric man named Spear and paired him with Fang, a vicious yet perceptive T-Rex-ish dinosaur in an emotional allegory that explores loss, friendship and survival without spoken dialect. “Primal” saw its five-episode TV premiere in October, but for the Oscars it was packaged into a four-part epic where fans lucky enough got to see it on the big screen at the Downtown Independent theater in downtown L.A. Each chapter adds to the overall arc of the characters and story — a narrative that wastes no time diving into its subject matter.