Warner Bros. Animation’s ‘The Elephant’ Built on Surrealist Game of Exquisite Corpse
The new animated special, The Elephant, streaming on HBO Max, is a psychedelic journey born from a decades-old artistic game and a daring creative challenge. Warner Bros. Animation senior vice president Vishnu Athreya tasked a quartet of acclaimed animators with crafting a cartoon in the spirit of Exquisite Corpse, a surrealist technique where collaborators build upon each other’s work with minimal context.
The origins of Exquisite Corpse date back to the early 1900s, emerging between the end of World War I and the start of World War II. the game involves a small group creating a drawing or story, with each participant only seeing the last contribution of the previous artist-enough to connect, but not enough to comprehend the whole. The results are frequently enough delightfully bizarre and nonsensical.
Athreya envisioned applying this principle to animation, wanting to assemble a team of talented animators to each contribute a segment to a larger narrative without knowing what the others were creating. The result is The Elephant, a 23-minute special comprised of three distinct acts. While loosely connected, the segments are best appreciated as a visually and tonally diverse triptych.
The project brought together Pendleton Ward, creator of Adventure Time, for a futuristic, video game-inspired opening; Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe) and Ian Jones-Quartey (OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes) for a contemporary,music-focused middle act; and Patrick McHale (Over the garden Wall) for a cozy,nostalgia-tinged finale.
All four animators, who previously collaborated on Adventure Time, faced the unique challenge of building a cohesive narrative without full knowledge of the overall story. McHale, as an example, felt the need to “reestablish that concept” of life and death within his segment. “I showed myself a speedy sequence of lives and deaths to reestablish that concept and make sure the ending made some sense,” McHale saeid.
While McHale focused on narrative cohesion, Ward sought to introduce an element of playful disruption.With “Gamekeepers” monitoring interaction, Ward devised a loophole, inspired by the collaborative “jam comic” process. “I wanted to do a jam comic,” Ward stated. “I wanted to try to communicate with the others. So I invented a device that could send a message thru my act into another act.”
That “device” manifested as a cartoon mousetrap at the end of his act, holding a scrap of paper with a simple drawing of two birds. Ward shared the drawing with Sugar and Jones-Quartey, hoping they would incorporate it and pass it on to McHale.The plan didn’t unfold exactly as envisioned. Sugar and Jones-Quartey included the image in their segment, pinning it to a board of clues, but it didn’t appear in McHale’s act. “However they used it would be cool,” Ward said. “I was like, maybe they’ll burn it for kindling. I wasn’t sure what they would do with my jam comic, but I sent it forward.”
Ward also hinted at other subtle easter eggs connecting the acts, such as a “rune” passed from Sugar and Jones-Quartey that appears in the cave at the end of his segment.
Facing the challenge of concluding the story with limited knowledge of the preceding acts, McHale opted for a simpler approach. “I thought it might be best to just embrace a small character story rather than try to make sense of all the big conceptual stuff,” he said. His segment, the most grounded of the three, unfolds as a charming romantic comedy as the robot protagonist falls in love with its inventor.
“Pretty much every decision I made was just in service of trying not to entirely embarrass myself by ruining the film and wasting everyone’s time,” McHale admitted. Ultimately, he and his collaborators-Ward, Sugar, and Jones-Quartey-created something truly special and unique. While Athreya deserves credit for assembling this talented team, it’s their ingenuity in bending the rules of the assignment that makes The Elephant such a rewarding experience. The Elephant is streaming on HBO Max.
