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…