In the early 1900s, sometime between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, a group of surrealist artists got together and invented the game. IN Exquisite Corpsea small group works together to draw a picture or write a story. The catch is that you can only see the very end of what the previous person contributed – just enough to associate your image or words with what came before, without having any idea what you are reacting to. The results are often strange, funny and nonsensical.
More recently, Vishnu Atreya thought about the Exquisite Corpse. Atreya is a senior vice president at Warner Bros. Animation, and he was trying to come up with a new idea for an animation project. He wanted to bring in some great animators, and each of them would contribute their own short story to the larger story, without having the slightest idea of what the rest might look like. In other words, he wanted to make an Exquisite Corpse cartoon.
Result Elephantstreaming now on HBO Max. This psychedelic 23-minute animated special consists of three very different acts. The pieces fit together freely, but are best thought of as a triptych of visually and tonally distinct stories:
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A futuristic warm-up inspired by video games comes from Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward
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Contemporary, music-oriented middle act from Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe) and Ian-Jones-Quartey (OK, KO! Let's be heroes)
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Cozy, nostalgic final act Patrick McHale (Behind the garden wall)
Four animators who also worked on Adventure Time At one point or another, he quickly agreed to Atreya's proposal and his strict rules, which stated that there could be no conversation or exchange of information between the group regarding their actions. Then they decided to find any loophole to give some structure to this absurd task.
“We kind of passed little things off to each other,” Ward tells Polygon.
How did they do it? The connections and clues are subtle, but once you see them you'll appreciate Elephant on a completely different level. Polygon spoke with Ward and McHale about how they tackled the impossible task of creating a cartoon together without being able to communicate.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for The Elephant.]
Before getting started, the first thing the animation team did was sit down and play the traditional game of Exquisite Corpse. Together they drew three quirky characters and then each chose one to be their main character. They also agreed to one narrative rule: each act had to end with the death of the main character so that he could be reborn in a new body in the next entry.
This created several problems for McHale. For one thing, he wasn't particularly enamored with his character, a Frankenstein's monster with extra limbs sticking out in random directions.
“I was the last one to choose from our three character designs, and mine looked very strange,” McHale told Polygon via email.
His decision? Kill her almost immediately.
It also gave McHale the opportunity to reinforce the themes of death and rebirth that were to run through Elephant. In the opening moments of his segment, we see the main character die and be reincarnated several times before she finds herself stuck in the body of a poorly made robot. This scene served as a backup scene in case other animators broke their promise to kill off their characters.
“I thought I would create a safety net for myself by showing a quick succession of lives and deaths to restore that concept and make sure the ending made some sense,” McHale says.
While McHale tried to make sure Elephant made sense, Ward was busy adding an extra element of chaos. Atreya appointed two “jaegers” to carefully monitor and censor any communication between the animators. So Ward found a loophole.
“I wanted to do a jam comic,” Ward says, citing creative process where multiple comic book artists collaborate on a single issue. “I wanted to try to communicate with others. So I invented a device that could send a message through my action to another action.”
This “device” is a cartoon mousetrap that appears at the end of Ward's speech, and his “message” is a piece of paper with a simple drawing of two birds that lands on the mousetrap in the last frame of the opening sequence. Ward gave a copy of this drawing to Sugar and Jones-Quartey (via Gamepeekers), hoping that they would include the drawing and even share it with McHale.
Things didn't go quite as planned. Sugar and Junes-Quartey included an image of Ward in their segment, where it appears pinned to a clue board, but that is the last we see of the jam comic. He never appears in McHale's act.
“Any way they use it would be cool,” Ward says. “I thought: Maybe they'll burn it for kindling. I wasn't sure what they'd do with my jam comic, but I sent it along.”
Ward hints that there are other tiny Easter eggs linking the three acts. For example, note the “rune” that Sugar and Quartly gave to Ward, which appears in the cave at the end of the first act of “Elephant”.
With no real idea of what preceded it (despite Ward's best efforts to convey the secret message), McHale was faced with the difficult task of bringing this chaotic three-part story to a satisfying conclusion. He tried many ideas, some of which were “very complex”, before settling on something much simpler.
“I thought it might be best to just embrace the story of a small character rather than trying to figure out all the big conceptual things,” he says.
McHale's performance feels the most grounded of the three, slowing down the frantic tone of the previous acts and creating a charming romantic comedy as the protagonist transforms into a robot and begins to fall in love with his inventor. It's a surprisingly fitting end to what can often seem like a nondescript project.
“Pretty much every decision I made was just an attempt to not embarrass myself by ruining the movie and wasting my time,” McHale says.
In the end he did more. McHale, Ward, Sugar and Jones-Quartey have teamed up (sort of) to create something special and unique that their fans can come back to for years to come. And while Atreya deserves a lot of credit for putting together this animators' dream time, it's how the group tried to bend and break the rules of their assignment that makes the viewing experience Elephant such a rewarding experience.
Elephant streaming on HBO Max.
