Get your first look at Animals, HBO’s new animated series

By Rick Marshall January 26, 2016

New York City is a weird place — and as HBO’s new animated series Animals reminds us, that’s as true for the city’s human residents as it can be for the other creatures that call it home.

HBO has released the first trailer for Animals, the upcoming animated series for adult audiences that will premiere next month on the cable network. Produced by Jay and Mark Duplass (who collaborate on HBO’s Togetherness), Animals appears to offer something akin to a mix between Girls, BoJack Horseman, and The Secret Life of Pets, with the various nonhuman inhabitants of New York City dealing with all the eccentric and mundane elements of daily life in the Big Apple.

The mice living among the city’s human population, the horses that cart tourists around, and the pigeons that fill the skies all feature prominently in the trailer for the series, which also boasts an impressive ensemble cast of voice actors from the comedy world.

Along with Matt Walsh, Nick Kroll, Ben Schwartz, Marc Maron, and Kumail Nanijiani, Animals will also feature a diverse list of guest stars that include hip-hop musician A$AP Rocky and actress Jessica Chastain.

The official synopsis for the series reads as follows:

Created by Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano and produced by Duplass Brothers Television, Animals. focuses on the downtrodden creatures native to Earth’s least-habitable environment: New York City. Whether it’s lovelorn rats, gender-questioning pigeons or aging bedbugs in the midst of a midlife crisis, the awkward small talk, moral ambiguity and existential woes of non-human urbanites prove startlingly similar to our own.

Scheduled to premiere February 5 on HBO, Animals was inspired by a series of short films produced by NYC advertising creatives Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano, and is animated by the same team that works on the popular Rick and Morty series. The series has already been picked up for two full seasons by HBO, which is a pretty good vote of confidence for the show.

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