Animation is mostly dead on television here in America. Saturday mornings are filled with horrible card battle cartoons and an endless stream of knockoffs, ripoffs, and awful, low-rent imports. It’s a wasteland. A few years ago a man named Genndy Tartakovsky tried to remedy that, by creating a brilliant animated series called ‘Samurai Jack’.
If you’ve never seen ‘Jack’, then you’ve missed one of the greatest pieces of animation ever to hit American televisions. Every episode was a work of art, a complete and total masterpiece of story, and stunning, two-dimensional visuals. It won four Emmys, and deserves every one of them. The series told the story of a Japanese samurai from the past launched into a dystopian, far-off future ruled by an evil warlord and populated by killer robots. There, the samurai sets off on a quest to right wrongs and find a way back home.
After the series ended, there was talk of turning it into a live action movie. Luckily, those projects failed. Samurai Jack belongs in animation. The story is great, but Tartakovsky’s two-D artwork is a critical part of telling it. The idea of making it a movie however isn’t dead. Instead, Variety says Samurai Jack will be reborn as an animated feature film.
The project is being pushed through by a new animation company called Frederator Films, an entire organization dedicated to making nothing but 2-D animated genre movies with below $20 million budgets. In addition to a Samurai Jack movie, they’re planning a claymation feature called The Neverhood and a hip-hop project called The Seven Deadly Sins.
But it’s Samurai Jack that I care about, and it sounds like the folks at Frederated Films have their heads screwed on straight where it’s concerned. They’ve turned the reigns back over to Genndy Tartakovsky, who will write and direct the movie. Even if it’s just a feature length version of the series I’ll be happy. No need to upgrade, just give us more of what we got on the Cartoon Network show, and the movie will be absolutely brilliant.
