In the early 1900s, sometime between the end of World War I and the start of WWII, a bunch of surrealist artists got together and invented a game. In Exquisite Corpse, a small group works together to draw a picture or write a short story. The catch is that you can only see the very end of whatever the previous person contributed — just enough to connect your image or words to what came before without having any idea what you’re responding to. The results are often weird, funny, and nonsensical.
Somewhat recently, Vishnu Athreya was thinking about Exquisite Corpse. Athreya is a senior vice president at Warner Bros. Animation, and he was trying to come up with a new idea for an animated project. He wanted to bring in a few great animators and have them each contribute their own short to a larger story without having any idea what the rest of it might look like. In other words, he wanted to make an Exquisite Corpse cartoon.
The result is The Elephant, streaming now on HBO Max. This psychedelic, 23-minute-long animated special consists of three wildly disparate acts. The pieces loosely fit together, but they’re best enjoyed as a triptych of visually and tonally distinct stories:
- A futuristic, video game-inspired opening act comes from Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward
- A contemporary, music-focused middle act by Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe) and Ian-Jones-Quartey (OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes)
- A cozy, nostalgia-tinged final act from Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall)
The four animators, who all also worked on Adventure Time at one point or another, quickly agreed to Athreya’s pitch and his strict rules, which stated that there could be zero conversation or shared information between the group about their respective acts. Then, they set out to find any loophole they could to bring a bit of structure to this absurd assignment.
“We sort of gave each other the little things back and forth,” Ward tells Polygon.
How did they do it? The connections and clues are subtle, but once you see them, you’ll appreciate The Elephant on a whole other level. Polygon spoke to Ward and McHale about how they handled the impossible task of making a cartoon together without actually being able to communicate.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for The Elephant.]
Before getting started, the first thing the group of animators did was sit down and play a traditional game of Exquisite Corpse. Together, they drew three freakish characters and then each picked one to serve as their protagonist. They also agreed to one narrative rule: each act had to end with the main character dying so they could be reborn into a new body in the next entry.
For McHale, this posed several challenges. For one thing, he wasn’t particularly enamored with his character, a Frankenstein monster with extra limbs poking out in random directions.
“I was the last to choose from our three character designs, and mine was super weird-looking,” McHale tells Polygon via email.
His solution? Kill her off almost immediately.
This also gave McHale a way to reinforce the themes of death and rebirth that were supposed to run through The Elephant. In the opening moments of his segment, we see the protagonist die and reincarnate multiple times, before she finds herself stuck in the body of a poorly made robot. This scene served as a backup, in case the other animators welched on their promise to kill off their characters.
“I thought I’d create a narrative safety net for myself by showing a quick sequence of lives and deaths to reestablish that concept and make sure the ending made some sense,” McHale says.
While McHale was trying to make sure The Elephant made sense, Ward was busy throwing in an extra element of chaos. Athreya had assigned two “Gamekeepers” to carefully monitor and censor any communication between the animators. So Ward came up with a loophole.
“I wanted to do a jam comic,” Ward says, referencing the creative process where multiple comic book artists collaborate on a single issue. “I wanted to try to communicate with the others. So I invented a device that could send a message through my act into another act.”
That “device” is a cartoon mousetrap, which appears at the end of Ward’s act, while his “message” is a scrap of paper with a simple drawing of two birds on it that lands on the mousetrap in the opening segment’s final shot. Ward passed along a copy of that drawing to Sugar and Jones-Quartey (via the Gamepeekers), hoping they would incorporate the drawing and even share it with McHale.
This didn’t exactly go as planned. Sugar and Joones-Quartey incorporated Ward’s image into their segment, where it shows up pinned to a board of clues, but that’s the last time we see the jam comic. It never appears in McHale’s act.
“However they used it would be cool,” Ward says. “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 hints that there are other tiny Easter eggs connecting the three acts. For example, keep an eye out for a “rune” that Sugar and Quartley passed back to Ward, which shows up in the cave at the end of The Elephant’s first act.
With no real idea what preceded him (despite Ward’s best efforts to send along a secret message), McHale faced the difficult challenge of bringing this chaotic three-part story to a satisfying conclusion. He tried multiple ideas, some of which were “very high concept,” before landing on something much simpler.
“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 says.
McHale’s act feels the most grounded of the three, slowing down the frenetic tone of the previous acts for a charming romantic comedy when the protagonist gets reincarnated as a robot and begins to fall in love with his inventor. It’s a surprisingly fitting end to what can often feel like a borderline indescribable project.
“Pretty much every decision I made was just in service of trying not to completely embarrass myself by ruining the film and wasting everyone’s time,” McHale says.
In the end, he did more than that. McHale, Ward, Sugar, and Jones-Quartey came together (sort of) to create something special and unique that their fans can revisit for years to come. And while Athreya deserves much of the praise for assembling this dream-time of animators, it’s the way the group tried to bend and break the rules of their assignment that makes watching The Elephant such a rewarding experience.
The Elephant is streaming on HBO Max.
