The New Yorker, May 27, 2002 P. 76
ANNALS OF POPULAR CULTURE about television animator Genndy Tartakovsky and his popular Cartoon Network series, "Dexter’s Laboratory" and "Samack"... "Samurai Jack" is moody and atmospheric and hardly ever has gags. It takes place in the future, to which Jack has been banished by Aku, a demon whose body is long and supple and whose eyebrows are little crescents of fire that burn even underwater... "Samurai Jack" is not science fiction, and it’s not romance. "Samurai Jack" doesn’t resemble any other cartoon on television. To begin with, Jack almost never speaks. Tartakovsky thought that the action shows he watched as a boy contained too much talking, and had plots that were needlessly complicated. Tartakovsky is portly. Tartakovsky’s parents were Soviet Jews and they worried that anti-Semitism would shadow the lives of Genndy and his brother, Alex, who is two years older, so they emigrated in 1976... Each day, before leaving for school in America, Tartakovsky watched cartoons, and on Saturdays he would get up early, study the listings of cartoons in the paper, and plan a schedule for the morning... Tartakovsky finished high school in Chicago. Since there was no local animation industry to speak of, he decided to study advertising art and to make animated films as a hobby. He enrolled at an art-and-film school in downtown Chicago called Columbia College. At Columbia, he had a teacher named Stan Hughes, who collected 16-mm. prints of classic cartoons. Tartakovsky used the school’s editing machines and advanced the cartoons by hand one frame at a time, and then he drew each frame, paying attention to how the characters moved and how the animators achieved their effects. His closest friend at Columbia was an animator named Rob Renzetti. Renzetti had applied to the California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles, and hadn’t got in. One day, he showed Tartakovsky the school’s catalogue. "It was like opening the Bible," Tartakovsky recalled... Tells how he attended the school for two years, and eventually got a job with Hanna-Barbera Studios at what would become the Cartoon Network... Writer describes a writer’s meeting for "Samurai Jack" and a single glum episode of the series... "Samurai Jack" is also being made into a feature-length movie by New Line Cinema, with actors instead of animated figures, and Tartakovsky is writing the screenplay...