Yahoo News Genndy Tartakovsky Teases Plans for Animated Comedic Heist Series
ANNECY, France — Five-time Emmy Award winner Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of “Samurai Jack” and “Primal,” is developing “Heist Safari,” a 10-episode comedic robbery that will have the feel of a musical, Tartakovsky said.
The robbers are three brother frogs, control freak James, neurotic Issac, and little George, who thinks he’s brilliant but is actually totally not. Estranged, they meet up at their father’s funeral, where they are informed that they will only inherit his fortune if they pull off a bank heist, stealing the contents of a bank’s vault numbered 88.
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Trouble comes when all three cut side deals for help in the form of a Japanese yakuza tiger, a Russian mafia hippo and an Italian gorilla mobster. The police are wildebeests.
Every episode is executed as just one shot and they will not be told in chronological order. The whole has an EDM score, said Tartakovsky.
“This whole show came to me because of how quick media is getting. We’re all flicking through entertainment this quickly. And so asked myself: How can I do a show that’s fast and intense but is going to trap you so that you can’t click past it,” Tartakovsky said.
Given Tartakovsky’s remarks came at a packed Adult Swim studio focus at this week’s Annecy Animation Festival in France, they came off as an effective pitch for backing from Adult Swim, which produced and aired the final season of “Samurai Jack” and “Genndy Taratakovski’s Primal.” They were made, moreover, in the presence of an Annecy audience, the most knowledgeable of animation publics, who reacted with applause and enthusiastic laughs.
A showcase for Adult Swim series in production, two of which have just been greenlit, the Adult Swim studio focus drilled down on the company’s history and legacy in adult animation and, notably, its development process with first-time creators.
Development at Adult Swim with new creators is to put them “into somewhat of a corporate process without extinguishing their creative spark and extinguishing the thing that makes it unique,” observed Suzanna Makkos, Adult Swim executive VP, original comedy and adult animation.
The session also showcased Adult Swim’s Smalls program, whose touching two-minute “Ha Ha Clowns,” created by Joe Cappa (“Ghosts Dogs”) and screened at Annecy, has just received an Adult Swim full series pick-up along with “Oh My God, Yes! A Series of Extremely Relatable Circumstances.”
The Annecy showcase also sneak peeked the opening sequence of Takashi Shano’s “Rick and Morty The Anime” – high on anime, low on Rick – and “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads,” its first-ever Spanish-language series, a stop-motion telenovela created by Gonzalo Cordova (writer on “Tuca & Bertie,” “Adam Ruins Everything”) and produced by Mexico City-based studio Cinema Fantasma (“Frankelda’s Book of Spooks”).
Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel, co-creators and stars on Adult Swim’s “Smiling Friends,’” just renewed for a third season – news also greeted with hearty applause at Annecy – drilled down on the show’s origins: “It’s like a really weird looking character but they’re in debt or they’ve got to pay taxes. That contrast was the DNA of the show,” said Cusack.
Cusack and Hadel had high praise for Adult Swim. “Of all the notes we get, Adult Swim’s are the most organic. We never feel boxed in. It’s always suggestions. When you do get such a great collaboration with someone like Cam [Tang] and Adult Swim in general, it pays dividends because it makes us even more excited, because we know that we can kind of get away with a lot,” Cusack added.
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