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This one’s for all our TV animation nerds. At the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Adult Swim announced an innovative new special from the minds behind some of the buzziest animated series in recent history. Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), Ian Jones-Quartey (OK K.O.!), Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall), and Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) are all teaming up—well, sort of—for The Elephant, which is being billed as a “one-of-a-kind animated event so mysterious, even they don’t know what it’s about.”
Produced by Titmouse (the studio behind Bojack Horseman, Star Trek: Lower Decks and more), The Elephant is a three-act special where each creator is in charge of a different act “without any knowledge of what the others are making,” per a press release. Sugar and Jones-Quartey will partner for one act while McHale and Ward will take one act each. Presumably to make sure the project has some coherence, Jack Pendarvis (Adventure Time) and Kent Osborne (Summer Camp Island) are on board as “game masters” guiding the project “for a storytelling experiment that unfolds as a collaborative surprise, ultimately merging into a single, unexpected narrative.” The Elephant premieres in 2026, alongside a behind-the-scenes documentary that will give fans insight into the making of the innovative special.
Among the other projects Adult Swim announced at Annecy is Keeping Up With The Joneses, “a half-hour adult animated comedy that follows the Newberry family as they try to ‘keep up’ with their staggeringly wealthy Dallas neighbors – including the one next door, Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys.” Joneses comes from Hugh Davidson, Rachel Ramras, and Larry Dorf, the co-creators of The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window. There’s also Genndy Tartakovsky’s Heist_Safari, about “three Frog brothers robbing a bank,” which was pitched on stage at Annecy last year. The network announced a premiere date—August 17—for Gonzalo Cordova’s (Tuca & Bertie) Women Wearing Shoulder Pads, a quarter-hour stop-motion series about a “proud wealthy Spaniard living in 1980s Quito, Ecuador.” In addition, Smiling Friends and Ninja Kamui have both been renewed for two more seasons each. Adult Swim fans will be well fed over the coming months!
