Courtesy Cartoon Network
Television is many things, some of which are not even bad for you. But one thing it is rarely is lovely to behold. The dry visual protocols set in place in the medium’s infancy, when screens were small and pictures black and white and the spatial template was the vaudeville stage, still hold sway to a remarkable degree. The TV image is typically flat and overlit — all the more so with the proliferation of “reality” programs, tabloid talk shows and cheap documentaries — which makes it easy to see but hard to regard. Composition is merely functional. Color, when it arrived, was a miracle sufficient unto itself, and its expressive potential was never really explored: The idea wasn’t to be arty, but actual. Even now, with HDTV nipping at your nose, most television is pictorially neutral — reined in by factory economics, making almost all its points through speech and broad action. In lieu of pretty pictures it gives you pretty people, which is not necessarily such a bad thing, he said, thinking of Lauren Graham. Oh, and Alyson Hannigan. And Stockard Channing, for that matter. As usual, there are exceptions to prove the rule: The X-Files and its respect for shadow and light and atmosphere; CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, whose grainy, oversaturated look suggests too many hours on the Las Vegas Strip; Nike ads; cartoons.
Samurai Jack, which concerns a temporally displaced wandering warrior and the world-ruling demon he is sworn to destroy, is the new cartoon from Genndy Tartakovsky, the inventor of Dexter’s Laboratoryand co-developer of The Powerpuff Girls, and on the evidence of its first two hours, it is the most beautiful thing on TV; certainly it’s the most impressive new show Cartoon Network has fielded in a while. It’s no knock to Dexter’sor Powerpuffto say that the series seems “cinematic” in relation to other TV cartoons in the same way The Sopranosdoes to other hourlong TV dramas. For all that the animation is, as they say, “limited,” it packs in more ideas than the last six Disney features combined, and if not all or even very many of these ideas are completely original — I see midcentury travel posters, Little Golden Books, 1950s Disney educational shorts like Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the minimalist battle-choreography of anime — they seem fresh and electric as recombined or repackaged or reinvented here. (Like many animated series in the post–Ren & Stimpyteleverse, Samurai Jackis steeped in the extravagant curves and jagged edges of postwar design.) One less obvious influence on the show is David Lean, whose Lawrence of Arabiaand Dr. ZhivagoTartakovsky watched for lessons in composition — the image is sometimes “letterboxed” — and mood, and in telling stories with pictures. Many cartoons are only decorated talk, after all — the drawings just indicate who’s making the noise. But here, every frame glimmers with ambition and delight.
Though not made as Art — Tartakovsky just calls Samurai Jack “a highly stylized action show” — the show is certainly artistic, and feels different from any other cartoon on TV. Higher-toned, somehow. Eight degrees more finely crafted. Still, the look of the show is cartoony largely in the loony sense; its jaunty abstractions share an aesthetic with Dexter’sand Powerpuff. What’s different is its application to a “serious” extended story, and the level of pictorial refinement: a more than usual emphasis on painterly effects, on chiaroscuro and texture and reflections and refractions of light. By eliminating the black outlines that traditionally bind and define cartoons and leaving the screen a place of colored shapes and painterly effects, Tartakovsky and company — most notably including background artists Dan Krall (who draws them) and Scott Wills (who colors them) — achieve something more obviously akin to illustration or studio art.
Plotwise as artwise, the show is a blend of familiar ingredients. Tartakovsky, who is just a hair past 30, is a Star Warsbaby and has steeped his creation in The Hero With a Thousand Facesas distilled by George Lucas: “Let the sword guide you to your fate, but let your mindset free the path to your destiny,” Jack’s father advises him, sounding every bit the Obi-Wan Kenobi. Jack is also Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name (Jack is not actually his name), with similar close attention paid to his eyes. So far the series has mostly played repeating variations on the old reliable cowboy-samurai theme of the oppressed liberated from their opressors by a taciturn wanderer, efficiently but never gratuitously violent, who like Shane then moves on. (As in grown-up movies, violence is also an excuse for prettiness.) There is relatively little dialogue, which in some ways is just as well — when characters do speak, they tend to say things like “There is no escape!” and “What trickery is this?” and “Now, demon, with the blessings of righteousness and the power of the sacred blade, I cast thee back to the vile pit from which you came.” Occasionally they do have intentionally funny things to say (“Even dogs should not be forced to live like dogs,” swears Jack), but the comedy is largely visual and small and silent: It’s not quite right to call it Chaplinesque, but it’s not quite wrong, either.
