Genndy Tartakovsky’s R-Rated Dog Romp Is Finally Off the Leash

How’s this for a R-rated animated comedy idea: A pooch and his doggy friends go out for one wild night on the town before he’s set to get neutered. Good, right?

“I think it’s the best elevator pitch I’ve ever had,” says Genndy Tartakovsky, about the concept for Fixed, his first R-rated feature, which premiered at the Annecy film festival on Wednesday. “Every time I say it, everybody laughs. You have the vision of a movie, right there.”

That pitch, back in 2009, was enough to get Tartakovsky in the door at Sony Pictures Animation. Tartakovsky was already an established, and Emmy-winning hitmaker, at Warner Bros. Cartoon Network, thanks to shows like Dexter’s Laboratory, Powderpuff Girls and Samurai Jack. Fixed was set to be his first feature, and Sony’s first-ever R-rated animated film.

Then everything changed.

“We started working on it, developing it, and then the executive that bought the pitch moved on to another part of the studio,” Tartakovsky recalls. “New executives came in, and they’re like: ‘Yeah, we don’t want to do this.’ Back then, 2008/2009, things were so different. Nobody’s making R-rated films. This is pre-Sausage Party [Seth Rogen’s raunchy animated hit from 2016], pre-all that stuff.”

Around the same time, Tartakovsky lost his day job. Samurai Jack got cancelled after its fourth season on Cartoon Network [the show would be revived 13 years later for a final 5th season on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim].

“It was a really dark time for me, I didn’t know what I was going to do,” says Tartakovsky. “Then, about two weeks later, I got a call from Sony. They’d fired the directors from Hotel Transylvania. The movie was struggling, and they asked me to take a look. I went in, looked at it and went: Yeah, this is a crazy romp. You got Adam Sandler, all these monsters. It should just be funny. I sat down, wrote 2 pages of gags. And they hired me.”

Tartakovsky got into the Hotel Transylvania business, directing the first three films in the franchise, and co-writing and executive producing the 4th. Tartakovsky’s three Hotel Transylvania films were the most successful features ever from Sony Pictures Animation. All three remain in the studio’s top five, just behind the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse blockbusters.

But Tartakovsky never gave up on Fixed.

“As the new [Sony] executives started to believe in me, I kept digging it up, saying: ‘Hey, what about Fixed?’,” he says. “We’d do another pass on it. People would say: ‘Nah, nobody’s ready for it.’ We’d put it away. I tried to shop it to other studios. Perhaps would get it, but nobody wanted to commit.”

It wasn’t until Kristine Belson was named president of Sony Animation in 2015 that things started to change. “It became less about the brand of the studio and more about just getting good projects made,” says Tartakovsky. He kept pitching Fixed. In 2019, 10 years after it bought his original pitch, Sony gave him a green light.

The core of the story, with characters inspired by his real-life pack of high school buddies — “Bull (voiced by Pitch Perfect star Adam Devine) is my buddy Steve, Rocco (Idris Elba) is based on my friend Mike,” Tartakovsky notes — was still there but Fixed had gone through multiple drafts and stylistic changes. Originally a hand-drawn 2D feature, at one point it was conceived in full computer-generated 3D. Tartakovsky showed the 3D mock-ups at a work-in-progress screening at Annecy two years ago, noting that the sight of Bull’s intact testicles, in full 3D, “was just too much.”

When New Line got on board to co-produce, the project morphed into a 2D, more traditional Looney Tunes-style animation.

“It helped with the budget, because I don’t know how to do CG cheaply and make it look expensive, but I can do that in 2D because of all the TV stuff that I’ve done,” says Tartakovsky. “But 2D was what I wanted to do all along. So it was a little accidental miracle.”

The voice cast — with Kathryn Hahn as Bull’s love interest Honey, a dirty-talking purebred, Fred Armisen as a nattily-dressed Dachshund Fetch, Bobby Moynihan as the perverted poop-munching mutt Lucky, and Beck Bennett as the snooty showdog Sterling — came together quickly.

Then, Fixed almost got clipped again. It was a victim of the great purge of David Zaslav, who took over as CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery following the two companies’ 2022 merger, and chopped or shelved several films, including Batgirl, Coyote vs. Acme, and Fixed.

The rights to Fixed reverted back to Sony, which tossed shopped the project into the market, for Netflix to fetch. Following its Annecy premiere, the streamer will let Fixed out, worldwide, on Aug. 13.

After 16 years, 3 studios and endless character designs and script drafts, Tartakovsky says he’s proud that Fixed is making it to screens as he originally intended. Even a particularly raunchy scene, an episode of, shall we say, canine intimacy, involving Bull, Honey and Sterling, made the final cut.

“That scene was in there in my first pitch, and every new executive who’d come in and read the script, that was the first scene they wanted to get rid of. But I thought, without that scene, there’s no movie” he says. “If I had sacrificed that scene, maybe this film would have gotten made earlier. But it’s the heart and soul of the film. So to watch it with an audience [here at Annecy] and here them laughing all the way through was the most incredible thing.”