Genndy Tartakovsky Talks 16-Yr Jounrey On R-Rated Animated Movie Fixed

Genndy Tartakovsky’s R-rated animated comedy Fixed – about a dog on a mission to get his rocks off, before they are chopped off by the vet – hits Netflix this week after buzzy screenings at Annecy and Montreal’s Fantasia Festival over the summer. 

Its arrival on the platform marks the end of a 16-year journey to get the movie over the line and connected to audiences for Tartakovsky, who is best known as the director of the first three movies in the Hotel Transylvania franchise as well as Adult Swim series such as Samurai Jack and Primal aimed at older audiences.

Fixed follows the adventures of canine protagonist Bull, voiced by Pitch Perfect star Adam Divine, who discovers he’s going to be neutered in the morning when his owners reach the end of their tether over his constant humping of grandma’s leg.

Hearing the news, his pack of longtime canine friends –  self-assured boxer Rocco (voiced by Idris Elba); wannabe influencer dachshund Fetch (Fred Armisen), and the goofy Lucky (Bobby Moynihan) – decide Bull needs one last adventure while his balls are intact. 

The true object of Bull’s desire, however, is statuesque pedigree show dog Honey, voiced by Kathryn Hahn.

Speaking to Deadline at Annecy in early July, Tartakovsky is quick to clarify that his dogs are neutered and that Fixed is in no way a critique of the practice. 

It was inspired, rather, by his desire to capture the dynamics of close, long-term male friendships. 

“It started with having a group of high school friends, like a lot of people have… we make each other laugh like no one else,” says Tartakovsky. “I wondered if I could take our dynamic, exaggerate it, caricature it and translate it into animated animal characters and make a movie about relationships.”

He first pitched the idea to Sony Pictures Animation in 2008 at which point he was best known for directing Cartoon Network hits Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls, and Star Wars: Clone Wars, the latter produced by Lucasfilm Animation. 

“I hadn’t done Hotel Transylvania at that point. I wasn’t really known… at least not for movies. They liked it… but it had nothing to do with neutering or anything. It was just these characters on a journey. One of the executives said, ‘We like this idea, and I get what you’re trying to do, but you need a high concept to wrap their story round’,” recalls Tartakovsky.

“Rarely this happens, but in that moment, lightning struck me, the idea hit me just like that. It was the craziest thing, and I go, ‘What if one of them is a dog and he finds out he’s going to get neutered in the morning?’ And that was it. The whole room laughed, and they bought the pitch and then began the journey of trying to figure it out.”

Tartakovsky brought two of his friends onto the project to help create the characters and their banter out of his own friendship group, although a character based on himself did not make the cut.  

“They all kind of correspond, but they’re an exaggeration of my friends. They’ll see themselves in the film a little bit, but it’s pushed a lot further. I was a Siberian Husky named Boris, with a big accent, but I cut him out because we had too many characters.”

He had no inkling of the journey that lay ahead for Fixed, and that ultimately it would end up on a platform, having originally envisaged the movie on the big screen. 

“An experience of a lot of people watching something together, especially comedy, where you feed off the laughter… that was originally the goal, but the business changed a lot from 2008,” he says.

Tartakovsky initially took the starts and stops on the project in his stride because animation often takes years to complete, especially when it’s pushing boundaries.

“It was normal at first, but this one took a turn. I knew it was going to be hard to sell because back in 2008, adult animation wasn’t really a thing. There’s always The Simpsons, obviously and a few other things, but it’s not like now. I knew it was a longshot,” says Tartakovsky.

“Well it sold pretty quickly, but then it was the ups and downs, like we want it, we don’t want it, we want it, we don’t want it, rewrite, rewrite and then we actually made it.”

Following a big casting reveal at Annecy in June 2023, the movie was completed later that year, with a theatrical release by Warner Bros. Pictures under its New Line Cinema banner lined up for August 2024. 

This never came to pass after Warner Bros. dropped the title, reportedly as part of cost-cutting measures by parent group Warner Bros. Discovery. 

“The business changed and then they didn’t want to release it and now we had to sell it to somebody else, so that was all of ’24,” recounted Tartakovsky. 

“The funny part is, I thought, well, we’ve got a finished movie. There’s no questioning it anymore, either you like it or not… and then nobody liked it, or rather it wasn’t that they didn’t like it, but they didn’t see it as a business.” 

He admits to hitting a low ebb when Netflix passed on the film first time round in 2024, and other release options failed to materialize.

“I understood why it wasn’t right for some studios or distributors, but I thought a small distributor could release it… my explanation is that it was just too different and unique… rated R, hand drawn, original.… those are not all positive things for an animated film” 

“I was going to a dark place, you start to question yourself. I asking, ‘What did I do wrong? Did I make something that I don’t think I made? Are people seeing it differently than the way I see it?’ Your confidence starts to go away.”

The clouds parted in January of this year after Netflix came back and announced it wanted the film after all. 

“My understanding is that John Derderian, who runs Netflix series animation, saw the film, loved it and pushed it through,” says the director.

Tartakovsky continues to work within the wider Warner Bros. Discovery group through his longstanding ties with the Adult Swim strand of its subsidiary Cartoon Network.

“It’s a big company. TV and features are very segmented. Features don’t really care if they hurt my feelings but to give them credit, Richard Brener who runs adult content comedy for New Line, he called me personally,” recounts Tartakovsky.

“He said, we’re not shelving it, we’re shelving these other ones, but you’re safe. I’m going to give it back to Sony and that was it… it wasn’t like, you know, screw you, Warner Brothers, I’m out of here, it wasn’t like that at all. It was like, ‘I’m sorry, that’s the reality of our business right now’.”

In the face of the challenges of working in the studio system, Tartakovsky says he has never considered going down an independent route, in the vein of the European features being showcased at Annecy, or Latvian Oscar-winner Flow.

“I could probably make a movie in France but then it’s going to be a very low budget and only a limited amount of people are going to see it,” he says.

“I used to pitch very inexpensive movies because I came from TV and know how to make a million dollars look like $10 million, and they’d go, ‘Genndy, we appreciate it but we don’t want to make $50 million on $10 million, we want to make a billion on $200 million,” continues the director, whose three Hotel Transylvania movies grossed more than $1.3 billion on a budget of $245 million.  

As the film hits Netflix this week, it will also be a test case for the appeal of animation aimed at older audiences, which Tartakovsky suggests has not developed at the same pace in the U.S. as in Europe and Asia.

“Comedy is hard, no matter if you’re doing it for family or for adults. I think adults are even harder because they’re more judgy about being funny. If it’s successful and opens the door for more of it, whether that’s a sequel or something else that is R-rated that would be incredible,” he says.

“We have all these adult series but features, it’s pretty much this kind of Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar, Marvel model. There are very few things that are different and that’s what’s frustrating – we should be as different as live action, so you can have a horror animated film, R-rated comedy animated film, or a dramatic animated film. It should be open to that.”

In the meantime, after the year of self-doubt, Tartakovsky was one of the animators of the moment at Annecy this year. 

Alongside presenting Fixed to an enthusiastic industry and student crowd, he was also in attendance as part a celebration of 25 years of Cartoon Studios, participating in a panel on its legacy.  

Adult Swim also took the opportunity to announce new details on Heist Safari, the series he is developing for the strand about three frog brothers who rob a bank. The director is also working on Motel Transylvania, a Hotel Transylvania series spin-off, for Netflix. 

In the backdrop at Annecy this year, the mood among the 18,200 participants was mixed amid shrinking budgets and concerns over the implications of AI for many parts of the workforce. 

Tartakovsky acknowledges it is a sea change moment: “We had a gigantic boom with streaming coming alive during Covid… it was at a height. I’ve never seen the industry like that,” he says.

“I couldn’t get people to work with me it was so busy and then it dropped completely. The B and C tier people, they’re always kind of in and out of jobs, but they’re easily surviving. A tier people always have too much work… now I would say half of the A people I know, don’t have jobs. I’ve been working since ’92, and I’ve never seen it like that. Everything’s changing, the whole business changes every month now.”

On AI, Tartakovsky says he has yet to get his head fully around its implications. 

“The big debate is, is it a tool that a creative person uses, or is it a tool for anybody and all of a sudden it becomes a product rather than a creative idea,” he says.

“Movie making, is an art and a business. They’re trying to make money, so it’s a business, but there’s usually a creative person who has an idea or a thought or a point of view that is their perspective.”

He likens the advent of AI to the arrival of the computer and, then CGI, which challenged hand drawn animation techniques for a time.

“When computers came we were afraid asking, ‘Is this going to get rid of paper? It did, but we were drawing in the computer, so it’s fine. Then CG came along, and now we’re manipulating puppets to move around rather than hand drawing something, and that killed some of the hand drawn industries and then that industry came back,” says Tartakovsky.

“Fixed is hand drawn and hand crafted. I always believe that there’s a place for that, but because it’s a business, it has to find its way to be successful… at the end of the day, it’s all about money. I don’t want to sound dark about it… but it’s a business.”