Adult Swim Reveals First-Look Images From ‘The Elephant,’ A New Special From Animation Icons McHale, Sugar, Ward, And Jones-Quartey

Adult Swim has assembled a superstar coalition of celebrated animation creators for one of its most ambitious projects to date.

Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall), Ian Jones-Quartey (OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes), Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), and Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) have reunited, in a manner of speaking, for Adult Swim’s The Elephant, a narrative experiment premiering December 19 as an ad-free special on Adult Swim before streaming the following day on HBO Max.

The project is produced as a triptych, with each act created in total isolation from the others. Sugar and Jones-Quartey collaborated on one segment, McHale and Ward helmed their own respective acts, and none of the teams were aware of what the others were making. “Game masters” Jack Pendarvis and Kent Osborne, both Adventure Time veterans, oversaw the process, guiding a story intended to make sense only once all three independently developed pieces merge on screen.

Today, Adult Swim has revealed three first-look images from the production, one from each act. The studio tells us they want to keep who helmed each act a secret for now, and while we have a guess, we’re not going to publish it as fact; we’ll update when we know more.

A companion documentary, Behind the Elephant, will debut on December 20 alongside an encore broadcast of the special. The film promises an inside look at the unusual production process, featuring interviews and footage that highlight the creative constraints, improvisations, and discoveries that defined the experiment.

Of the unique proposition, Adult Swim president said in a release:

Every year around this time, we try to give the Adult Swim audience a gift they didn’t know they needed, and this year, it’s Adult Swim’s The Elephant. But really, the gift was working with this brilliant team and creating an excuse for their longtime friendship and creative partnership to continue and evolve. We can’t wait for you to see the results of this crazy experiment.

Produced by Titmouse, The Elephant continues Adult Swim’s legacy of championing creator-driven projects, while pushing into even more unconventional territory. With four of the most influential animation voices of the modern era contributing independently to a single, blind-constructed narrative, the special stands as one of the network’s boldest year-end offerings.