Adult Swim Drops ‘The Elephant’ Trailer From McHale, Sugar, Jones-Quartey, Ward

Adult Swim has released the first full trailer for The Elephant, the experimental animated special created by an all-star team of artists including Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall), Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), Ian Jones-Quartey (OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes), and Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time).

The project has been generating buzz since its announcement during Annecy in June, and the new trailer finally offers a glimpse at how this unusual collaboration is coming together.

The Elephant is structured as a three-act narrative experiment in which each creator or pair of creators develops a segment independently, without seeing what the others are making. Those acts are then woven into a single story by a pair of game masters, giving the entire production the feel of a cosmic gumbo where even the artists are discovering the outcome as it unfolds.

The trailer doesn’t give much away in terms of plot, intentionally so. Adult Swim has been extremely withholding in what info it has been willing to share, even refusing to clarify which creators were responsible for the first-look images released last month. Instead, the new footage highlights tonal and stylistic contrasts between the three segments, teasing everything from atmospheric fantasy to surreal comedy.

The Elephant premieres December 19 on Adult Swim, followed by a companion making-of documentary, Behind the Elephant, arriving the next day.