2025: The Year in Adult Animation

Way back on New Year’s Day, 2025, Keith Stack released a silly, self-parodying sitcom-style short to Newgrounds and YouTube titled Wacky Lesbian Hour, based on his similarly styled Leslie and Brianne comics. Like too many contemporary animators, Stack hit his professional straps in an aughts-era internet of aggressively exaggerated irony, where everything could feel like a reference even if it wasn’t. So from the very first day of the year, the marker was placed: 2025 would be the year adult animators pursued the Hazbin Hotel model of endless remixed novelty all the more aggressively — if only because, as Wacky Lesbian Hour notes, that’s how you get “all the small donations” these days. And maybe, if you’re lucky, some of the bigger ones too.

The most straightforward way of getting this nostalgia fix is, of course, straight adaptation. Netflix has taken this route with its aggressive video game strategy: the second season of Castlevania: Nocturne appeared in January, a first season of Devil May Cry in April, and the second season of Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft in early December. Video games have built-in fandoms and premises that lend themselves well to flashy action scenes. The disadvantage? Video games rarely have rigorous narrative structures or emotional arcs. These Netflix shows boast plenty of visual flash but offer diminishing returns to anyone who isn’t already invested in the brand.

This is animation aimed at viewers not necessarily paying full attention to what’s playing in the background. Netflix still runs more serious animation in the BoJack Horseman mold, however. For example, BoJack showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg released a new autobiographical series, Long Story Short, which — though a nonlinear Jewish family comedy-drama — won plaudits from critics at The New York Times and National Public Radio.

Beyond built-in fan groups, Netflix’s marketing strategy increasingly relies on the algorithm to do the work. Take Haunted Hotel, another Netflix project in the generic adult animated sitcom style. This genre, though, remains largely locked up by Fox. The Simpsons, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, and American Dad were all renewed yet again. The Great North, a more recent offering about a single dad in Alaska told through the Bob’s Burgers aesthetic, didn’t make it to a sixth season. Krapopolis, a Dan Harmon creation about Greek mythology that once leaned into bizarre NFT-adjacent promotion, has long since abandoned that angle.

As for Harmon’s tentpole brand show, Rick and Morty, it still exists and is set to run for at least twelve seasons. This year brought season eight. For what it’s worth, Adult Swim — once at risk of becoming little more than a Rick and Morty delivery system — has spent much of the year leaning back into the genuinely weird. Incidentally, George Lowe, the voice behind Space Ghost Coast to Coast, died in March.

One example of Adult Swim’s renewed weirdness is Haha, You Clowns from Joe Cappa, a newly cultivated talent whose show manages to be both hideous and wholesome in its depiction of a father trying to raise his three very large sons correctly. Released in October, it has already been renewed for two more seasons. There was similar good news for February’s Common Side Effects, the pharmaceutically themed thriller from the Scavenger’s Reign team.

More than these legacy shows, however, the big adult animation story of the year is Glitch Studios. With some help from the Australian government and a great deal from merchandising, Glitch has achieved remarkable penetration with releases focused primarily on YouTube. The Amazing Digital Circus — which could be described as Toy Story crossed with I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream — hits the sweet spot of the 13-24 demographic with madcap mayhem laced with existential angst.

Speaking of deranged millennial scribbles, VivziePop is branching out beyond Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel with an unexpected project: an adaptation of Homestuck.

A focus on distinctive weirdness can even benefit something as boilerplate as Dungeons & Dragons. Tabletop fans have largely moved on from Stranger Things to Critical Role, whose campaigns are now adapted into animated series for Amazon Prime Video, including this year’s The Mighty Nein.

All of which is to say: there’s been a lot happening in adult animation this year. So much, in fact, that the genre label itself is losing coherence. Pick any two of the shows mentioned above and watch them back to back, and you may find little in common. In a sense, that fragmentation is adult animation’s greatest success — that it has finally expanded enough to do almost anything.