Genndy Tartakovsky doesn’t ease into his first foray into adult animation. He crash-lands into it — balls first. Fixed, his long-gestating new film for Netflix, is a raucous, R-rated, proudly scrotal animated comedy about a good boy named Bull who finds out he’s getting neutered in the morning and decides to go out with a bang. Literally and figuratively.
“It’s the last night out for the dogs,” Tartakovsky tells me. “And that’s it. That’s the movie.” The pitch, he says, was almost too easy. “I’d developed these characters based on my childhood friends — they used to be like a pig, a bear, whatever. It was gonna be a road trip movie, no plot, all personality. But Sony said, ‘Give us a concept. Maybe something adult.’” He snapped his fingers. “‘What if they’re dogs and one of them finds out he’s getting neutered tomorrow?’ Everybody laughed. They bought it right there.”
Tartakovsky’s résumé is absurdly stacked: Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Hotel Transylvania. But Fixed hits different. This is not Adult Swim weirdness at 11 p.m. — this is a full-on midnight movie with literal buttholes. “We drew them really simple,” he says. “Just a circle with an asterisk. And people were shocked! I guess I’m just desensitized.”
The absurdity is the point. “We talk about our dogs like they’re people. We give them voices. We narrate their inner monologues,” he says. “So I thought, why not make that the whole movie? If one dog pees on a tree and another comes along, what’s the conversation? That’s comedy right there.”
But this wasn’t just some late-night gag that got lucky. Tartakovsky pitched Fixed back in 2008. “We’ve always believed animation could go further — but the stigma’s still there. People think animation equals kids’ stuff,” he says. “Even with BoJack, Big Mouth, all the success on Netflix and Adult Swim… when it comes to theatrical or feature-length adult animation, it still scares people.”
He compares it to Akira and Heavy Metal, the kind of boundary-pushing VHS oddities that got passed around in the ’80s by nerds with good taste and no parental supervision. “That’s what I wanted. Something that felt a little wrong, but in the right way.”
There are no dog erections, for the record. “That was the line I didn’t want to cross. I don’t want to feel like I’m doing something icky,” he says. “But balls and buttholes? That’s just… that’s life. Go to a dog park. You see them! You don’t stare at them, but you see them. It’s normal. Why can’t the audience accept that?”
And then there’s Idris Elba. Who, at the time of voice recording, was still actively being floated as the next James Bond. “I thought, there’s no way,” Tartakovsky says. “But he read the script, saw the drawings, and loved it. He hadn’t done a lot of comedy before. Originally, I thought Rocco would be this cool, low-key guy, maybe like Jason Statham. But Idris went big. Really big. And it was hilarious.”
Big Idris energy, apparently, includes delivering a monologue with five different euphemisms for testicles. “He had the most lines about balls. He was cracking up. He owned it.”
The cast also includes Adam Devine, Kathryn Hahn, Fred Armisen, Bobby Moynihan, Michelle Buteau, Beck Bennett, and River Gallo — a murderers’ row of vocal chaos. But Tartakovsky saved a quiet tribute for the film’s most personal cameo: Papa Doug’s Vet Clinic, named after his father-in-law. “He had this huge mastiff named Drifus. I’d never had a dog. This one came at me like 200 pounds of muscle. But we bonded. He made me a dog person. So yeah, I named the clinic after him.”
As for what’s next, Tartakovsky’s got irons in the fire — though a few older ones may never see daylight. “There are still two or three I’ve stopped fighting for,” he shrugs. “I’ve moved on subject-wise. I’m onto the next phase now. But some of these ideas, man — five years in, still waiting. You pitch something new, try to get a foot in the door, hope somebody takes the risk. If I wanted to make what everyone else is making, I could sell a movie tomorrow. But I want to do something different. That takes longer.”
Seventeen years, in the case of Fixed. But it’s out there now — dog balls and all — and as Tartakovsky says, “When it finally happens, it’s worth it. That’s when you get to make the weird stuff.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
