We Asked an Animation Legend About His Five Favorite Cartoons
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I'm willing to bet that Genndy Tartakovsky is the driving force behind (at least!) one of your favorite childhood cartoons. Over the course of three decades, working in animation, Tartakovsky has created and/or served as the animation director on highly influential shows, including Dexter's Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. For some, like this particular Esquire writer right here, all four of those projects could easily make an all-time greatest animated series list.
But not everyone in the animation business has given the 53-year-old Tartakovsky the love he deserves. Unfortunately, a tenuous relationship with Lucasfilm has all but soured modern Star Wars projects for the celebrated animator. Back in 2008, a CGI reboot of The Clone Wars became official canon at Disney—and Tartakovsky's series was completely unavailable for fans to view for many years. Today, it's currently on Disney+—but the animator pursued his own projects, creating Primal and directing the Hotel Transylvania trilogy.
Recently, though, much of Clone Wars has made its way back into official Star Wars lore, thanks to shows like The Mandalorian. It also helps that showrunner Jon Favreau—whom Tartakovsky helped on storyboards for Iron Man 2—was a big Samurai Jack fan. Still, it's hard for Tartakovsky to fully enjoy the galaxy far, far away. "I don’t watch Star Wars much at all anymore," Tartakovsky tells Esquire over Zoom. "It was a complicated situation toward the end. But we were kind of the first ones to be allowed to play in the [Star Wars] universe a little bit, and luckily it worked... I saw the first Mandalorian episode, and there’s definitely a lot of Samurai Jack elements to it. So yeah, it's nice."
Outside of Star Wars, Tartakovsky has had an incredible working relationship with Cartoon Network and its nighttime programming block, Adult Swim. Almost all his work has aired on the service since the late '90s. His upcoming project, Unicorn: Warriors Eternals, will premiere on Adult Swim this Thursday. Ahead of the exciting new series, we asked Tartakovsky about the works that inspired him throughout his career. Naturally, it's a blend of East meets West—and a perfect encapsulation of what makes the animation legend's own work both unique and timeless. Below, Tartakovsky shares his top five favorite animated films and cartoons.
Dumbo (1941)
"It’s the cartooniest movie that Disney made, but at the same time it’s so emotional. That scene with her rocking the baby through the jail cell, you really feel that connection. And it’s funny as I think back about it—there’s so much of that movie that informs what I like. Dumbo never talked—and you know, a lot of my characters aren’t super dialogue-heavy—so that visual storytelling is just really great in that film."
Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)
"You can throw all of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies up [on this list] and it’ll work, but Laputa has it all for me. It’s got grand action-adventure and an amazing relationship between the two kids. He does it so sincerely that you love these two characters. The epic scale of the storytelling, the action, the armies—all the elements that he has at his disposal. You really feel the world-building in his movies and that influenced me a lot making Unicorn. It’s a special movie."
Tex Avery's Little Rural Riding Hood (1949)
"The city wolf brings his country cousin wolf into the city, and it’s all just jokes of them reacting to the little rural riding hood dancing. What I love about it is the cartooniness. Not just the extreme reactions, but all the stuff in the beginning too with the chase. This animator, Bob Cannon—who is one of my favorite animators—he animated a lot of that. It’s so simple, but just really funny. It’s one of the first things I fell in love with, in animation."
Cowboy Bebop (1998-1999)
“Amazing character relationships from the main cast, and some of the best sci-fi storytelling. Each episode is so unique to itself, which is something we’ve always been trying to do since the days of Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack. Each episode has a different tone—here’s the horror episode, here’s the funny one. Just watching that show, the way they do the action also almost feels like live-action, and the animation is fantastic. The cinematography was super cool. It just blew me away. On a selfish note: one of the animators told me that he really liked Samurai Jack back in the day, and it helped influence them to make their next show, Samurai Champloo. That was amazing."
Looney Tunes's "A Bear for Punishment" (1951)
“For me, Chuck Jones's Three Bears cartoons were the best character humor that you could get in animation. In one of the best ones, titled 'A Bear for Punishment,' it's Father’s Day—and the dad has to suffer everything they’re doing for him because he doesn’t want it. It’s so violent and awful, but it’s hilarious. I got into this field because I wanted to be an animator. As a kid, doing flip-books of a ball bouncing or a stick figure running across the page... showing it your friends and getting a laugh. That’s the beginning of it. Creating this movement out of nothing. Everything that I approach, I approach from an animator’s point of view. That’s how my brain certainly works. When you look at this list, there’s certainly dialogue. But it’s the visuals that shine."
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