Genndy Tartakovsky is hands-down one of the most recognizable animation directors in the United States. He shaped a lot of our childhood on Toonami with Samurai Jack, tackled giant franchises with original Clone Wars, and he’s grown with us most recently with his animated series Primal. Now, with Fixed, he’s embracing a nostalgic animation style, crude humor, and man’s best friend.
Fixed is directed by Tartakovsky, written by Tartakovsky, Jon Vitti, Steve Greenberg, and Rich Lufrano, and earns every bit of its R-rating. An adult animated comedy about Bull (Adam Devine), an average, all-around good dog who really loves old lady legs…for obvious reasons. But his life is shattered when he discovers he’s going to be neutered in the morning. Terrified and angry, the gravity of this life-altering event sets in, and Bull realizes he needs one last adventure with his pack of best friends. Think of it as a Bachelor Party for balls.
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As Bull spends his last 24 hours with his balls, his friends Rocco (Idris Elba), Fetch (Fred Armisen), and Lucky (Bobby Moynihan) show him new parts of the city, get him into danger, take him to a strip club, and get him ready to spend the rest of his life ball-less. Oh, of course, they help him attempt to make a lasting impression on his crush, Honey (Kathryn Hahn), a purebred competitor in dog shows who is stuck with a purebred named Sterling (Beck Bennett).
Director Genndy Tartakovsky understands what makes good animated sequences.
Still, the humor in this Netflix Original animated film pushes the boundary of offense so much that it loses any substance that it would have found otherwise. When it comes to jokes, they never crack through the low-hanging fruit that comes with a narrative about a dog trying desperately to keep his ball and avoid being neutered. It’s raunchy, definitely gross, and at times trying to shock so much that it falls flat.
I am all for raunchy humor and even those that I’m sure people on the internet will describe as “edge-lord,” but it ultimately has to mean something. In Fixed, none of it really does. Much of what we see happen feels more at home with a shock jock than in a film that ultimately does try to offer some heartfelt takeaways for its adult audience.
While it’s at its worst when we’re relentlessly pingponged between new jokes, all with the same theme, it gets hard to focus on where there could be any real semblance of a spark. To put it simply, Fixed gets in its way. The film’s animation may be some of Genndy Tartakovsky’s sharpest work visually, but its writing is far from great.
Additionally, while unique voices like Idris Elba, Fred Armisen, and Katherine Hahn are fantastic, Adam Devine’s lead performances often teeter on the edge of being too annoying to be endearing. It’s hard to critique the voices of actors who haven’t been trained to do voice acting work, but it shows through.
Too much crude humor with too little substance is this Netflix Original’s main issue.
Devine’s voice work is jarring throughout the film, and always puts me in surprise when it comes out of Bull. But then again, as Bull spends the last day with his balls (which also get anthropomorphically animated for close-ups), everything is jarring, so maybe it just fits.
Whether it’s putting Bull into disgusting situations or creating strip clubs for dogs (not a sentence I ever thought I’d write), or the neurotic identical dog show contestants, the situations that Genndy Tartakovsky and his team set up provide clear moments of excitement and perfection that you have to keep watching.
It would be much easier if I said that Fixed was bad. It would make the complexity that I am feeling much less frustrating. By no means should Fixed be called great, but it is a massive swing for the adult animation fences in a time where we get so little of it that I can’t help but understand where it’s coming from.
Fixed isn’t a home run, but it is an audacious swing for the fences from Netflix.
And by that token, the strength of the film’s animation is above many of the series and movies that companies like Pixar and Disney are putting out. One, because it’s 2D. And two, it’s not trying to sell a soft, round aesthetic. While I may have my issues with the film’s over-reliance on jokes about humping, it’s just solid animation through and through.
When Fixed is good, it is really good. The art style immediately calls back to the days of Ren & Stimpy, and it works exceptionally well. Aesthetically, we haven’t seen animation like this in well over a decade. It makes the film feel nostalgic, while the story and characters maintain their originality. From the decision not to show the humans’ faces to the investment in detailing physical gags we’ve seen in other animated projects that ring familiar, Genndy Tartakovsky’s shot at nostalgia is one of the best visually.
On that strength alone and performances around the main character, Fixed gets to go to heaven. It may not be the best animated film of the year, or the funniest. Still, it does continue to raise the bar for visual expectations and ultimately makes Netflix’s animation slate for 2025 the most holistic in approach to demographics and visual styles. It’s a risk worth taking as a viewer, and one that at the very least can be appreciated for consistently pushing animation boundaries.
Fixed is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.
