Where Does ‘Unicorn: Warriors Eternal’ Rank in the Tartakovsky Canon?

On Friday, “Unicorn: Warriors Eternal,” the latest series from the famed animator Genndy Tartakovsky, will wrap up its first season on Adult Swim. Decades in the making, this show about a group of immortal fighters was a passion project for Tartakovsky, who is best known for award-winning series like “Primal” and “Samurai Jack.” While “Unicorn,” which is streaming on the Adult Swim website and on Max, has many of the animator’s signatures, it does not always deliver to the standard of some of his earlier series.

What does “Unicorn” do well and less well? And what should you watch next if the series served as your introduction to Tartakovsky? I have broken down the good, the bad and the middling of his oeuvre — specifically TV series that he created and had the most creative control over (so no “Powerpuff Girls” or “Hotel Transylvania”) — and how “Unicorn” fits in with the rest.

‘Dexter’s Laboratory’ (1996-2003)

A zany and fast-paced series about a boy genius named Dexter and his inventions, which are often destroyed by his ballet-dancing older sister, Dee Dee, “Dexter’s Laboratory” is one of the original series that defined Cartoon Network in the 1990s. Though it lacks the loftier intentions of “Samurai Jack,” “Primal” and, now, “Unicorn,” it delivers in fun, original narratives and stellar sound design.

The show premiered as part of Cartoon Network’s animated anthology series “What a Cartoon!” in 1995 with a few short pilots. It graduated to a full series the following year, with a variety of short segments in each episode, including fun superhero parodies like “Dial M for Monkey” and “Justice Friends,” featuring goofs on Captain America, Thor and the Hulk.

The series’s main appeal, however, is its fantastical plot twists and developments within the span of stories that are just a few minutes long. “Dexter’s Laboratory” has a total of four seasons but Tartakovsky left after the second, and the series lost much of its comedic charms. Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.

‘Samurai Jack’ (2001-04, 2017)

An impressive marriage of classic kung fu movie conventions and futuristic sci-fi dystopia, “Samurai Jack” is not just an example of Tartakovsky’s animation at its best, but a masterful work in its own right. As in “Dexter Laboratory,” the animation in “Samurai Jack” is full of sharp, geometric silhouettes and bold colors. But “Jack,” like “Unicorn,” uses a wider swath of artistic reference points, including paintings of the Edo and Meiji eras and Impressionist-style watercolor paintings.

“Unicorn” comes the closest of Tartakovsky’s series to matching the stunning imagination behind the worlds and characters in “Samurai Jack,” which incorporates lengthy, intricately directed action sequences, split screens, modular frames and various aspect ratios. The sound design is so tactile that you can practically feel each stab, crunch or slice.

Through Jack’s classic hero’s journey, his noble questing and his encounters with new places and people who need his help, the series gives its story an epic scope. However, that narrative, with its repetitive “Kung Fu” western formula, can start to feel dull after a few episodes, but the revamped final season in 2017 was an improvement.

Though the story doesn’t always take off, “Samurai Jack” follows a fascinating line of questioning about what it means to control a historical narrative and how fascism is born and perpetuated through physical and mental slavery and oppression. Plus, it had an awesome theme song. Stream it on Max.

‘Star Wars: Clone Wars’ (2003-05)

Separate from the C.G.I. show “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” from 2008, this series explored the years between “Star Wars” films — specifically “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith” — long before Disney+ arrived with its ever-expanding cache of spinoffs. But the show succeeds where so many of the franchise’s extensions fail by including enough familiar characters to satisfy fans while pushing the story into invigorating new directions.

In terms of the action sequences, “Clone Wars” and “Samurai Jack” are both first-rate, but the former’s combination of light-saber fighting and Jedi parkour, gymnastics and force-pushes makes for a more dynamic watch.

Tartakovsky proves to be the perfect match for George Lucas, who is notorious for writing dialogue as stiff as the hinges of an unoiled C-3PO. Tartakovsky’s minimalist approach to dialogue allows the visuals and unfolding action to speak for themselves; the additions he does make, like fresh exchanges between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi and the introduction of a new sith-in-training named Asajj Ventress, further illuminate the workings of the “Star Wars” universe. Stream it on Disney+.

In this throwback to ’80s and ’90s fantasy mecha (read: giant robot) shows, a princess, a moody warrior sent to protect her and a robot escape a war on their home planet to settle on Earth as normal human high schoolers. But when their enemies pursue them to Earth, the three discover that they can “Voltron” themselves together into a giant robot fighter via a psychic link, à la “Neon Genesis Evangelion.”

This show somehow manages to be too much and not enough: too much camp without the bite, too much earnest replication of the flashy ’80s and ’90s animation style, too mecha and yet too little humor, too little grounding, too little nuance. The humor is D.O.A., the jokes and cookie-cutter dramatic scenarios (fish out of water, a wacky intrusive neighbor) are set up neatly but executed without finesse or charm.

The backdrops still have the clean, simple lines and balanced palettes of Tartakovsky’s other work. But they get quickly swallowed by the unctuous gleam and artificial gloss of the central action sequences and by character art that feels dated and muddled, a mix between decades old anime and saturated graphic novels of the previous 10-15 years.

“Sym-Bionic Titan” stands out as one of the more loquacious series in Tartakovsky’s career. It shares this quality with “Dexter’s Laboratory,” but “Sym-Bionic Titan” is more awkward and cringe-worthy. Rent it on iTunes.

At a glance, you might expect “Primal” to be defined by viciousness and machismo — “Metalocalypse” but with dinosaurs. The series, about a primitive man and a dinosaur traveling together, bonded by grief, is violent and masculine. But it is never gratuitous, even when a dying woolly mammoth’s eye looks out pleadingly before being blinded by a sharp stone.

That wounded eye says it all. The show, which was renewed for a third season earlier this month, is grounded in a brutal, unflinching philosophy of empathy and survival, exploring how empathy can be both a necessity and hindrance in a fight for survival.

From its visual artistry to its unblinking, unsentimental depiction of connection and loss to its well-placed moments of levity, “Primal” feels like a natural evolution for Tartakovsky’s style and writing following “Samurai Jack.” The animator has tended toward spare dialogue, but “Primal” is practically nonverbal. The result is a captivating series that pulls you in to its world and doesn’t let go. Stream it on Max.

‘Unicorn: Warriors Eternal’ (2023)

Tartakovsky started this series about 20 years ago, around the time he concluded work on “Samurai Jack” and “Clone Wars.” But “Unicorn,” which has been popular but has not yet been renewed for another season, has neither the sophistication of the former nor the fine-tuned action of the latter.

The warriors of the title are magical immortals who are repeatedly reborn as different, seemingly ordinary individuals in order to fight an ancient evil — a robot named Copernicus locates each reborn warrior and awakens their dormant powers. “Unicorn” centers on the journey of Emma, who is struggling to adapt to her recently activated warrior alter ego, Melinda, a sorceress with devastating destructive power. She’s joined by Edred, a Legolas-type elven swordsman who was Melinda’s lover in a previous life, and Seng, a floating bald kid who recalls Avatar Aang, drifting in and out of the astral plane.

Tartakovsky drew from Hayao Miyazaki (“Howl’s Moving Castle,” “Castle in the Sky”) for the wonderfully fantastical 19th-century steampunk setting — Copernicus’s speechless reactions, spare but full of meaning, are classic Tartakovsky. But the rest of the storytelling is more traditional, and it is flattened by a humdrum plot and a poorly written female protagonist.

Tartakovsky’s projects tend to be predominantly male, so perhaps it is unsurprising that Emma/Melinda is saddled with a pat dilemma meant to give her character emotional complexity. She’s caught between a meek, accommodating persona and that of a powerful entity, a well-worn trope from animated series, especially anime. (See “Yu-Gi-Oh!” and “Jujutsu Kaisen,” among others.) It doesn’t help that her identity crisis is conflated with a romantic crisis, as lovers from the two halves of her life vie for her affection.

Ultimately “Unicorn” builds worlds and mythologies but not the urgent stakes or interesting characters to drive them. For all of the magic in the series, it is missing the magic of Tartakovsky at his best. Stream it on AdultSwim.com and Max.