The Primevals, or, Mighty Joe Older Than I Thought

I first heard about The Primevals via Letterboxd, so all I knew about it was that it was about tracking a Yeti in the Himalayas, it contained a lot of stop-motion animation combined with live actors, and it was released in 2023.

So watching it, I figured I knew exactly what it was: a movie from the 2020s made in homage of the kinds of adventure movies that came out in the early 1980s, which were themselves homages to movies from decades earlier. And while The Primevals was a little too slow and kind of inert to really wow me, I had a huge amount of respect for just how fully they committed to the bit.

It was only after I finished that I discovered the real story behind it: it was released in 2023, but had been a passion project for animator David W Allen as far back as the 1960s. He’d gone through several attempts to get it funded and completed over the decades, and the original teams included legendary animators like Phil Tippett. Filming for the live action segments took place in 1994. Allen passed away in 1999, but his friends and collaborators took the work and released in posthumously, over 20 years later.

And it’s pretty remarkable that all of that legacy is visible in the end product, but it also is completely believable as a 21st-century homage. The image quality is good enough, and the compositing between live actors and animated characters seamless enough, that I just assumed it must be a modern movie painstakingly recreating the look of an older one.

In retrospect, I should’ve been much more suspicious. The lead character is played by Juliet Mills, who I knew as the witch Tabitha from the underrated soap opera Passions. It should’ve occurred to me that she looked exactly same age as she did during that series. And all of the other performers have that late 90s/early 2000s look that is difficult to describe exactly, as if they’re all familiar as guest stars from an episode of Murder, She Wrote or Star Trek The Next Generation.

The end result is that the movie seems completely unstuck in time. The stop motion calls back to Ray Harryhausen if not older, the effects work and sets evoke the fantasy adventures of the early 1980s, and the actors and overall script seem to be working in the golden age of the SciFi channel in the late 90s or early 2000s.

It’s also a little racist, in a way that feels more dated and thoughtless than genuinely malicious. Our few Nepalese characters are quickly either killed or relegated to the background, and the main characters are all white. Including a safari leader with the impeccable name of Rondo Montana! Also, a brief scene in a street that’s supposed to be Kolkata1 has the only presumably-Indian characters be murderous thugs and thieves.

I have to say, though, that it was a pleasant change to see a story where all the conflict was external. Everybody in our team of protagonists are all nice and respectful to each other, without much attempt to stir up drama. I didn’t realize how much I missed watching a story about a bunch of characters without having to reach the inevitable point where they start turning on each other.

The story is little more than a loose framework designed to showcase a bunch of different stop-motion sequences. It’s got an awful lot of the live actors either walking from one place to another, or staring at something off-screen in disbelief. For an adventure story about tracking a live Yeti, there’s not a whole lot of action.

But if you’re a fan of classic stop motion, this has a ton of it, all excellently nostalgic. At the time I’m writing this, it’s playing for free with ads on Tubi. Fans of old-school stop-motion probably are way ahead of me on this one, and have already seen it. But if you like the style of Ray Harryhausen movies and haven’t yet seen The Primevals, it feels like a kind of undiscovered treasure.

1
Still referred to in the movie as “Calcutta,” which should’ve been another clue that it was from an earlier time. (I just thought, again, that they were committing to the bit).

1 Still referred to in the movie as “Calcutta,” which should’ve been another clue that it was from an earlier time. (I just thought, again, that they were committing to the bit).