Adult Swim president Michael Ouweleen knows the industry is “being much more bullish” about adult animation than when his popular programming block premiered in 2001 on Cartoon Network. It’s a noteworthy shift for Western audiences, who’ve spent decades watching mostly family sitcoms dominate the medium.
“Without people making animation synonymous with kids only, I don’t even know if we’d ever use the term ‘adult animation.’ It’s a term that’s in negation of a perception. Animation is not one thing. It’s a production method that allows for a lot of things that other production methods don’t allow for,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s something secret about animation that allows it to last longer, travel more and mean more to people — for them to wear it as their identity a little easier — than other production methods.”
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During a Friday panel at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Market, where Ouweleen, along with Suzanna Makkos, EVP, original comedy and adult animation at Max and Adult Swim, and Peter Girardi, EVP, alternative programming for Warner Bros. Animation, teased their respective slates, that shift in industry attitudes became clear as the studio and distributors embraced both more multigenerational shows, that are “rewatchable” and “travel globally,” according to Ouweleen.
“When I first came [to WBA], Adult Swim and Fox were the only two buyers really, and they had very specific kinds of programming requirements. Adult Swim was programming quarter hours and Fox was doing Fox shows. It was kind of a noun — Fox shows — and you knew what they wanted: a family and probably something anthropomorphized,” Girardi tells THR. “But it’s not like that now. There’s a much wider, more excited audience out there where you can program specifically for them.”
Renewal and date announcements abounded on the panel for the programming looking to capture that audience. That includes Velma, which scored a season two order; the sophomore season of Bill Lawrence, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Clone High, which was was dated for 2024; and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, which got a surprise season three reveal.
But the companies’ interest in adult animation beyond The Simpsons‘ and Bob’s Burgers was clearest with two Warner Bros. Animation projects: James Gunn and Peter Safran’s upcoming DC animated Max series, Creature Commandos, and an adaptation of Joel Rose and Anthony Bourdain’s graphic novel, Get Jiro!, for Adult Swim.
“It’s definitely a new lane for us. The closest we get to things like that are when we do the DC projects, but it’s tights and capes,” Girardi says about Get Jiro! “It’s not silly, forehead-high characters. It has all the trappings of genre, and is set in the future. It seems like it’s post-apocalyptic. It’s all about chefs who are almost like warlords now, but at its heart, it’s really a drama. It’s not anime looking, but it walks and talks and feels a little like that because of how seriously we’re taking it. We’re not using typical animation staging.”
“There’s a war and there’s a power structure. It’s all about socioeconomic stratification, but it’s also about the emotion of food,” Ouweleen adds while discussing the serialized, half-hour, animated, food-centric, action-satire. “In a Hayao Miyazaki movie, the food is so lovingly presented. It is an emotional moment. We want real quiet moments in this thing, where someone’s making rice and it takes five minutes of screen time.”
Like Bourdain, Gunn is a fan of comics, but also animation, even if he hasn’t spent much of his career working in it. For Makkos, it’s his commitment and excitement, as well as his knowledge of this specific property, that made them eager to work with him in the space. “He knew Creature Commandos — one of his favorite comics — when he took over the DC Universe,” she says. “He literally wrote the episodes. He has cast the voices. He’s designed the art. He’s so passionate about it.”
“James brought a whole other flavor to it, which is the sympathy that he has for these ‘monster’ characters,” Girardi adds. “I’ve never worked on something like that before.”
During Warner Bros. Animation’s portion of the panel, WBA’s EVP of alternative programming touched on another DC property, Harley Quinn, and the development of its spin-off Kite Man: Hell Yeah! (formerly Noonan’s). That came alongside a preview of the in development class-driven family comedy Keeping Up with the Jones,’ the studio’s first adult animated project from the creative team behind Mike Tyson Mysteries, also set to release on Max.
Girardi credits Harley with paving the way for adult shows like the Jones‘ and particularly, Velma, which taps into Hanna-Barbera IP. “It helped us reframe and get a better handle on all of the theories we had about working with IP,” he says. “How much reinvention it could withstand, how much humor you could put into it, how much audiences wanted to laugh with us about this IP and not have an almost theological reverence for it, which sometimes can get in the way of utilizing the IP.”
Pulling from the Warner Bros. catalog, however, is a creative line the WBA executive says the studio carefully walks, always working to ensure they put it back on the shelf “better than when I found it.” It’s a stance the studio behind Velma and Fox’s Flintstones series Bedrock takes because it’s “not just trying to take advantage” of available IP, Girardi says.
Within Adult Swim’s slate presentation was the Primal announcement, with Tartakovsky, in a statement, declaring that, “Primal has become a contagious disease that I don’t ever want to cure. Every episode flows out like an unstoppable force beyond my control.” There were also peeks at new Smiling Friends and a first look at Common Side Effects, a half-hour comedy currently in development that’s produced by King of the Hill‘s Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, from creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely.
The series explores how former high school lab partners Marshall and Frances unravel a conspiracy to suppress knowledge about a cure-all mushroom that could rid the world of diseases.
“It’s a skewering of late stage capitalism with all the themes of now and today, but a Bonnie and Clyde comedy heist at the same time. It’s high-concept. I’ve never felt a piece of animation like this,” Ouweleen says. “We’re also doing Primal and Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, and we think that there’s more to do in dramas or prestige animation. We’ve got other things cooking that expand what people usually think adult animation should be doing. It’s not just family sitcoms.”
As does WBA, which is working on a few projects with Matt Reeves’ 6th & Idaho, as well as a hybrid puppet project that’s “essentially a dynastic political drama,” according to Girardi. These are all examples of how the studio and platforms are looking beyond adult animation’s comedy comfort zone and venturing into other genres, including drama, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, mystery and young adult.
“Adult animation is in a renaissance and, I think, burgeoning,” Ouweleen says. “But animation has the ability to speak to multiple people at once, so hopefully, we’ll continue that. Our mission is to keep advancing what the medium is doing. The challenge of that is making it a success.”
Beyond WBA and Adult Swim, Max provided a look into their expanding animation slate, including Tom Kauffman’s Anything Factory and Uptown Bodega, which are in development. Both center on adults working to support their families, one under real and the other surreal circumstances. They also share degrees of adult animation’s traditional comedy leanings, something Girardi notes has been a go-to genre for its ability to perform well in repeats on linear.
It’s also a genre that Makkos says the streamer will continue to focus on. “It has to be someone’s favorite show, so how do you make sure it’s someone’s favorite show? I wanted to do lots of different kinds of things, but comedy is where you win in my opinion,” she explains of Max’s programming strategy. “Then everything we were and are doing asks about the theme. What’s underneath the show? What is it about? What is it trying to talk about? Sometimes those are obvious, and sometimes they’re not as obvious.”
Those additions were previewed alongside updates on current and upcoming Max programming, such as Luke Wilson-led Fired on Mars; Titmouse’s sci-fi epic Scavengers Reign; the first trailer for season two of Ten Year Old Tom; and a first look image from Young Love, a spin-off of the Oscar-winning animated short Hair Love. Debuting this fall, the story follows the Young family, led by millennial parents Stephen and Angela, as they juggle careers, marriage, parenthood and social issues.
Young Love has the potential to reach the older end of the young adult demographic (and beyond), which Max is also tapping directly with Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake. The spin-off of Pendleton Ward’s popular and long-running Cartoon Network series Adventure Time is newer territory for the streamer and the industry. The series centers on Fionna, a gender-swapped version of the original show’s character Finn, and her cat, Cake.
While currently the sole title explicitly described as young adult among Max’s Annecy slate, it is evidence of a growing interest within the industry of animation geared towards teens and 20-somethings. “The Adventure Time fans have grown up and people are still coming in the bottom and they’re aging up,” Makkos says. “It felt like a perfect show for us. Tonally, it is very much Adventure Time, but Fiona’s older. She’s in the workforce. It’s more adult, so I think it’s going to bring in new fans, and it’s also going to serve the fans that we already have.”
That small commitment to testing the waters with young adult audiences and coming-of-age stories was the result of the streamer’s viewership data. “We see it in the numbers. There are shows that appeal to young audiences. There shows that appeal to older audiences and shows that appeal widely across,” she says. “I feel like that’s the home run in animation, whenever you can get something that can play to both audiences. Spider-Verse is a great example of that, and so is Clone High.”
“Demo-wise on linear a title might skew really female, and then on streaming the opposite,” Ouweleen adds about how shows perform, including Adult Swim’s Smiling Friends, which was also teased during the panel and has amassed a younger fan base. “There’s not really rhyme or reason, but the thing is, you’re getting totally different cohorts, and you need both.”
While it might feel like an expansion of the medium, in some ways, what WBA, Adult Swim and Max are doing harkens back to the days of ’90s animation. Particularly the early days of Cartoon Network, with series like Courage the Cowardly Dog, Samurai Jack, Cow and Chicken and Dexter’s Laboratory suggesting “the idea that animation works for multiple ages,” Ouweleen says.
“That thought of let’s do cartoons for multiple generations is the inciting incident at Cartoon Network. It’s the beginning of it,” he continues. “It was never at its inception that ‘kid channel.’ It was always, ‘We were a psychographic, not a demographic.'”
What’s brought the industry around to that once again is, in part, the streaming age, execs say. “The ability to tell inclusive stories and feel like it doesn’t have to be mom, dad, two kids — that that is not the way we need to represent every animated show — is a big change that has happened in the last five to 10 years,” Makkos says. “I’m not even sure if I was still programming a linear network like Fox, a broadcaster, they would even be as open as we are in streaming.”
For Adult Swim, streaming offers a chance to “build an audience” across multiple linear and non-linear platforms, Ouweleen says, while also providing more homes for genre-diverse content. “There’s things that certain networks and streamers are looking for that other people are not. They have different needs than other streamers,” Girardi tells THR. “We have all this Batman content at Amazon that was at Max at a certain point, and it didn’t work out. They found a great home at [Amazon], and they have complementary programming to put around that. It fits into a strategy there.”
In one way, streaming has presented a new age for adult animation that may simply not have been possible on linear. “When we started Max, it was how do we get people to want to subscribe? That gives you a much wider band than it would be if it’s, this advertiser requires a certain demographic,” Makkos says. “I think democratization is one of the business reasons that storytelling has been able to expand in the way it has, and not just in adult animation.”
