Primal is an apt title. The show depicts primal violence, primal rage, primal grief. But what I was most surprised by was its display of primal empathy. Yes, the show is gorgeously and lavishly animated. There are shots that will take your breath away, and it knows when to rev up the engine and when to slow down and luxuriate in the stillness and beauty of the environment, much like Samurai Jack before it. Yes, it is a brutal and gory show- every hit has impact, and the fifth episode is bloody enough to make Mortal Kombat blush.

But the core theme running through the show is empathy. The animation pays just as much attention to the eyes as they do the action sequences, knowing that in a show without words, eyes are truly windows to the soul. A perfectly placed soft smile will melt your heart. And each episode returns to that theme of empathy. It'd be an easy excuse in a prehistoric story to say that at our primal core, humanity are monsters. But we're not- we're animals. Animals can be brutal, violent, ruthless. But they think and feel as well, and it is empathy that is the main characters' biggest strength.

It is empathy that leads them to bond and grieve together. It is empathy that leads Spear, the neanderthal, to help a pack of starving humans without second thought. It is empathy that diffuses a situation with woolly mammoths who did not want vengeance but simply the opportunity to mourn and honor their fallen. Spear and Fang the dinosaur's bond is what gives them strength, and the interconnectedness of life is reinforced even in its antagonists, whether in comparison like a group of bats and a spider working together to feed or in contrast like the group of apes that brutalize each other for the chance of brutalizing strong foes for glory. The protagonists even defeat the bats by leading them into the territory of a separate pack of beasts. Nothing is truly alone. The companionship of Spear and Fang is what sets them apart and strengthens them. Empathy is what keeps them alive. And it is that heart that elevates Primal from being not only something nice to look at, but an engaging work of art.

Primal, for the very brief run it has been on in 3 years, sets an exemplary tone of adult animated shows can be more than "complex inter galactic warfare brimmed with meta-humour and anti-meta-narrative" or to simply put "haha, sex is funny" or "laugh in the misery of the supposed glassed virgin," or "haha, depressed guy taking drugs, hope they get better soon" which sadly has been the forefront of Adult Swim, or what seems to be the norm at the doorstep of its content. Primal seeks out to nullify that, and it all needed to do was to go back to their roots, quite literally even, and tell a narrative of how a man, aptly named Spear, and his rival-first/semi-pet friend-later Tyrannosaurus Rex, also aptly named Fang, setting up their character without a coherent piece of exchange of dialogue between the two, unless you count constant gruntling, using their instincts to work together, overcoming challenges and it's beautiful.

Primal is a visual masterclass on how "show and tell" is a more of a ingenious tactic from the creators of the forefather, primitive for the creation of Adult Swim later on, Gendy, besides his art-work, was creatively bounded by the suitable watchers of young children and early teens but always managed to pull of the darker strings in PowerPuff Girls and Dexter's Laboratory, and unfortunately almost capped that off with the almost brilliant it set out to be in Sym-bionic Titan in his later parts of his career. Nevertheless, greenlighted to make a mature version of Samurai Jack, which by all-means is an all timer in it's own right, Gendy's true vision in storytelling unlocks at the helms of his latest project in Primal. While being creative in his designs, it's always a tougher challenge to make your art speak volumes, and ironically enough, the lack of dialogues amplifies how it achieves that, while concomitantly builds the tension it's rooted itself in the setting he chose. While yes, the "focus-on-character, shock-face, reveal-dilemma" might get a bit jaded and repetitive for the amounts of time they limit themselves, it does however create for a violent contention of World Building, which I believe would never be suitably built elsewhere except in the realm of Primal, that episode in, episode out has been subjected with consistent writing. Primarily built on 2 characters, there's always a case of how stagnant the show can get, with only a singular filler in a span of 20 episodes separating them, the layers on either of them hinders from them being just that and probably why the "anthology-aspect and feel" of the show helps that as well while being in the major compound focus of the theme, i-e, Survival. All in all, a sublime watch for gore fans, history fans and people who are looking for animated recommendations.

Season 1: ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ (9.0/10)
Season 2: ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ (9.0/10)