Leaping Into Action

Try to imagine a young cartoonist making this pitch: It’s an action-adventure show about a samurai whose ongoing battle with a supremely evil, world-conquering creature forces him back and forth in time. And even though the title is “Samurai Jack,” it’s not anim e, the currently hot, easily recognizable style of animation from Japan.

Oh, yes--the show also shatters practically every visual convention of modern TV cartooning, and some half-hour episodes feature little dialogue, relying instead on visuals and music to deliver the story. It’s the kind of pitch that tends to elicit door-slamming as children’s programmers today face the crushingly competitive animation market and most cope by looking for sure bets and familiar formats.

But for cable’s Cartoon Network, it was another chance to try something that had not been done before. It mattered, of course, that the young cartoonist in question was Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of Cartoon Network’s seminal series, the Emmy-nominated, Annie-winning “Dexter’s Laboratory,” and one of the creative anchors of the network’s in-house production operation.

“The truth is, Genndy could have come in with virtually anything and we probably would have said yes,” says Linda Simensky, Cartoon Network’s senior vice president of original animation.

The fact that the 90-minute premiere of “Samurai Jack” earlier this month and its five subsequent weekend plays drew a collective 11.5 million individual viewers--a mix of kids and adults--only confirmed that vote of confidence.

In addition to “Dexter,” Tartakovsky has served as a producer and director on the Emmy-winning “The Powerpuff Girls” (the creation of Craig McCracken, who is not part of the “Samurai Jack” team), and is animation director for the upcoming theatrical release “The Powerpuff Girls: The Movie.”

When the 31-year-old artist requested time off from “Powerpuff” to develop a new idea, the network happily obliged.

“I didn’t want to repeat myself; I wanted to do something different,” Tartakovsky says. He came back to the network with a six-page pitch for a show that was unlike anything Cartoon Network--or anyone else, for that matter--was producing.

“It was called ‘Samurai Jack,’ which sounded like it was funny, but it really wasn’t set up to be a funny show,” says Simensky. Animated action--”superhero stuff,” as Tartakovsky put it--has long fascinated the Moscow-born, Chicago-reared cartoonist. At the same time, he was growing weary of the nonstop talkfests that television cartoons had become. “There are so many sitcoms, especially in animation, that we’ve almost forgotten what animation was about--movement and visuals,” he says.

The first half-hour of “Samurai Jack” contained only about two minutes of dialogue. The silence was most pronounced in two sequences: an emotional scene in which Jack as a child is separated from his father by the evil Aku, and a nine-minute montage of Jack receiving combat training from various warriors (he even learns archery from Robin Hood).

Given the chance, Tartakovsky maintains, young viewers have no difficulty following the stories without the filibustering.

“I’ve always felt that kids are a lot smarter than we’ve given them credit for, but we’ve never given them a chance to figure things out as they’re watching television,” he says.

“As long as I communicated my ideas clearly visually, and timed them and executed them right, the children understand.”

For the sequences in which there are voices, Tartakovsky hired actor-comedian Phil La Marr for the voice of Jack and veteran actor Mako to voice Aku.

The scarcity of dialogue in many episodes of “Samurai Jack” puts a far greater emphasis on the music scoring, which is composed by “Powerpuff Girls” veteran James L. Venable. “[Genndy] mentioned to me that that first episode was something like 23 minutes and had two minutes of dialogue, and I said, ‘OK, well, I guess I’ll be doing some work on that,”’ Venable says, laughing. “We’re pretty much approaching every episode like you would a feature film. All the episodes are composed,” as opposed to using stock themes.

Part of the challenge for Venable comes from Jack’s penchant for turning up in several countries--sometimes in rapid succession--which requires appropriate music for each scene.

“The trick is to stay somewhere in between what people think that culture’s music is and what it really is,” Venable says.

The only live musicians used for scoring “Samurai Jack” are woodwind player Don Markese and Venable himself, who plays percussion. The rest of the “orchestra” is created through an electronic sampler--a keyboard that can duplicate the sounds of each instrument.

But if the music for “Samurai Jack” is somewhat stylized, it has nothing on the show’s graphics. In an effort to get as far away from the late 1950s, heavy ink-line look of “Dexter,” Tartakovsky went for the kind of stylization pioneered by the old UPA Studios: angular, expressive characters (most of Jack’s acting, he notes, is done through his eyes) with no ink lines visible at all, against stark, flat backgrounds painted by Scott Wills.

Another eye-grabber is the show’s frequent use of such cinematic devices as split-screen and letterboxing. At times, the screen fills with three vertical panels, each showing a different angle or piece of action; at other times, it irises down to a small rectangular window on Jack’s face.

“I think the audience is a lot more adept to looking at split-screen from music videos and commercials,” Tartakovsky says. “I thought if I brought that to animation, it would really make the show more unique.”

One of Cartoon Network’s stated production goals was to revive the “unit” system of animation employed in the golden age, when cartoons were created organically by a core group of artists led by a director, as opposed to the departmentalized studio system that has dominated TV cartooning for decades. Some within Tartakovsky’s core unit--which includes directors Rob Renzetti and Robert Alvarez, storyboard artist Paul Rudish and background designer Dan Krall--have been together since the 1993 Hanna-Barbera series “2 Stupid Dogs.”

So how did this crack comedy unit make the shift from the gag-driven cartoons of “Dexter” to the pure, choreographed action of “Samurai Jack”?

According to Simensky, very naturally. “If you look at ‘Powerpuff’ and even some of the later ‘Dexters,’ they were sort of moving into [action] anyway,” she notes. “A lot of these guys like comedy and they like action, and that’s why you get this hybrid--they like both things and they’re learning how to fuse them together in cartoons.”

But for Tartakovsky, characterizing the show is beside the point. “From week to week, the episodes are really going to range in their scope,” he says. “The first half-hour is very moody, very serious, and the second episode gets a little sillier. There’ll always be a little humor thrown in from behind.”

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“Samurai Jack” can been seen on Cartoon Network on Mondays at 8 p.m., repeating Fridays at 7 p.m. The network has rated it TV-Y7-FV (may be unsuitable for children younger than 7, with a special advisory for fantasy violence).