Summary

Genndy Tartakovsky chats with Steve Weintraub ahead of Fixed.

The road to getting this adult animated movie was a long and challenging one.

In this interview, Tartakovsky also discusses the movie’s most shocking scene: “People are laughing from start to finish.”

Animation is proving as popular as ever on Netflix. At the time of writing, old favorites such as 2010’s Megamind are back in the charts, with the unstoppable force of KPop Demon Hunters becoming one of the streamer’s biggest hits of the year. Now there’s a new animation on the platform, only this one you won’t want to watch with the whole family. Co-written and directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, the raunchy animated dog comedy, Fixed, made its Netflix debut on August 13 and is already receiving plenty of praise. The certified fresh rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes to date is more than worthy of celebration, especially considering the bumpy road the film had until this point, a zero-to-hero story Tartakovsky calls “incredible.” The film boasts an impressive voice cast, including the likes of Idris Elba and Kathryn Hahn, fresh from Heads of State and The Studio, respectively, as well as Adam Devine, Fred Armisen, Bobby Moynihan, and Beck Bennett. Ahead of the movie’s release, Tartakovsky sat with Collider’s Steve Weintraub to chat about all things Fixed, from the long and winding journey the film had to get made, the excitement of animated movies proving popular on Netflix, some of the film’s most eye-opening scenes, and much more.
Genndy Tartakovsky Gives a Promising Update on ‘Primal’ Season 3

“Hopefully in a few months.”

Image via Adult Swim

COLLIDER: I’m going to start with what I always ask you when we talk. Are you done with Primal Season 3? Is it completely finished? GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY: It’s completely finished, finally. We should start announcing the plans for when it’s going to come out, hopefully in a few months. 2026. I can’t wait. Just want to throw that out there. Maybe you can’t say that. TARTAKOVSKY: Not yet. It’s coming, though. It’s coming. So the movie felt like it was stuck in limbo, and now people have seen it, and it’s at 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. What does it mean for you? Because there was a chance this wasn’t going to be released. TARTAKOVSKY: 2024 was limbo, and not even like a positive limbo where a lot of people were interested. There really was no interest. At a certain point, you start to reflect, like, “Oh, my God, what did I make? Did I make something unwatchable? Does everybody hate this so much?” But a company paid to make this, so there’s got to be something, and something wasn’t landing, or is it too ahead of its time, or whatever it was? I hate to cast blame on other people. I always look inside, like, “What did I do wrong, perhaps?” So, it was the suffering year of the unknown. Is it ever going to find a home in the right home, or is it just going to be a pay-per-view movie on cable somewhere that’ll just get lost? So yeah, it was miserable. Now that we’re so close to release, it’s incredible. The one thing that kept me going was I know enough about film history that all these great films went through either a miserable production where it was so hard and everything went wrong, or there’s always a really hard story that they had to overcome to get to a happy ending, and then it’s the biggest hit. For me, that’s all I was saying, like, “Right, well, we had a great production. Fifteen years to get it made, and now nobody’s going to release it.” But I know at the end of the day, it’s going to find a home, and it’s going to be a happy ending for us. That’s the only thought that kept me going. Then finally, here we are in January, Netflix picked it up, and then hopefully we can say in three months, the rest is history.
Netflix Is Championing Animation

“It has the opportunity to do different things.”

I’m so grateful to Netflix for picking this film up, and I think it’s the perfect place. I also think it’s amazing that their number one movie right now, and might be the number one movie of all time, will be K-pop Demon Hunters. Now, to go along with that, you have Fixed, which is this hard ‘R’ animated adult movie. I love it. TARTAKOVSKY: That’s what I’ve always thought Netflix is. It has the opportunity to do different things, because there is no brand of a Netflix film. They can have anything from an R-rated cartoon to a preschool to, obviously, live action comedy and drama, and action. So, it could find a home. For some weird reason, last week, Hotel Transylvania 3 made it to the top 10, and I was like, “Wouldn’t it be fun if it was like K-pop, Fixed, and Hotel 3 in the top 10?” It would be pretty surreal. It’s actually great because they’re doing so well with the animation. I love it because I love animation. They have a budget. They can make more movies.
You Won’t Believe One of ‘Fixed’s Most Shocking Scenes

“The juxtaposition of the pain and pleasure.”

In the opening of this movie, you have a scene with a bulldog trying to screw the grandmother’s leg. What is it like to direct animators on that? TARTAKOVSKY: It starts at the board, right? I did the board for that sequence, and so you start to figure out what is the funny expression? And the thing about it is, for 90% of it, I don’t think that deeply about it. Like, “What am I feeling when I’m screwing?” [Laughs] You kind of trust your natural instinct. When you’re drawing, it comes out. That’s the amazing part about it. So, it starts on the board. So I’ll draw up the whole sequence, then I’ll go back in and pitch it, and then some other ideas will come out as I pitch it, and I’ll make some adjustments, and then I’ll pitch it to the crew and to the executives and everything. Then, if everyone laughs… That was the first test sequence that we did, as well, to see if people would laugh. We even had an older version of the character design, and everybody was screaming and laughing. You start to understand what it could be. Then, when we record the voice, we’ll do extra adjustments on the expressions to match the voice perfectly. A great read. Maybe a read that the actor did. Like, “Adam [DeVine] did this funny little grunt, “Let me put this in here.” And then from there, by the time the animator gets it, we’ve got the layout, and they’ve got the board they can look at, they’ve got the vocal performance. Then I knew what stuff we didn’t want to show and how much we wanted to show, and then we just go for it. The really good animators just knock it out of the park because we know there’s a very clear directive. We’re not searching, like, “We’ll try animating it this way, and then if it doesn’t work, we’ll try animating it this way.” We didn’t have that kind of budget or time. So it was like, board works, great layouts, great animation, great sound, and there you have the idea. The best sequence in the film is in the third act, where Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” is playing and he’s being screwed from behind. Everything about that scene is A+. Please talk about putting that scene together. Where did you draw the line? TARTAKOVSKY: The Bill Withers song is after that scene. Oh, I’m so sorry. TARTAKOVSKY: That’s okay. That scene was “This Love is True.” [Laughs] So that scene was conceived in the very first draft, and to me, it was what this movie’s all about to a degree. The juxtaposition of the pain and pleasure, and the love confession, and everything. So, when I storyboarded it, it really came out effortlessly in a way, because I think it’s the scene that has been living in my head for so long. So it’s staging it for, obviously, the comedy and hiding. We don’t show anything. But I think people are so shocked because we don’t show anything. It’s that Cat People thing, where your imagination is always worse than anything, is stronger than anything we can show. In my career, whenever you can have a sequence where people are laughing from start to finish, that’s gold. That one starts with some giggles, and once you realize what’s happening, there’s big laughter, then there’s a little sound break, and it’s even more shocking when he goes faster, and then more laughs, you know? So everything came together, and the story got us there, too, and the characters. It’s one of those moments that you’ll always see in a rom-com movie. The profession of love and everything, but usually they’re just standing and talking. But with this, we found something to make it really funny, and a huge juxtaposition, obviously. Fixed is available to stream on Netflix now.

Fixed

Release Date

August 13, 2025

Runtime

86 minutes

Director

Genndy Tartakovsky

Writers

Jon Vitti, Genndy Tartakovsky

Producers

Michelle Murdocca