Created by Patrick McHale, Ian Jonest-Quartey, Rebecca Sugar and Pendleton Ward with Jack Pendavis and Kent Osborne

 If you know anything about recent American animation even one of those names is going to excite you. Between them they created Over the Garden Wall, OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, Steven Universe and Adventure Time. All of which are some of the most remarkable animated art of the century to date.

Here they’ve teamed up to create an Exquisite Corpse, meaning each of them animates one section but doesn’t know what’s coming until they see the last one. The name comes from an old riddle about blind men attempting to describe an elephant. All three are telling, essentially, the same story, they just don’t know it.

Ward of Adventure Time kicks off with the story of a sentient eyeball escaping from a surrealist factory and being pursued by the minimalist guards across multiple video game like levels while assisted by a mysterious spy called Meowmalade who is not in fact a cat. It’s a real hit the ground running moment and Pendleton Ward finds conflict in the clash between the grey uniformity of the guards and the fluid uniqueness of the eye, which quickly develops limbs and a face. If there’s a message here, and all art has a message, it’s in the languid joy and grace of the eyeball unfolding into its new body. Missing one limb, two others different shapes but still beautiful, capable and real. Great voice work from Maria Bamford too.

Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey pick the story up with the adventures of Music Button, a narrator who is one part cotton candy, one part infinite playlist. This is about the perils of being a creative person in public, the pastel colours and wonderfully curvy, lumpy, angular characters circling a razor sharp story about the difference between content and art. This is where the voice acting really digs in too with Sungwon Cho’s mysterious telephone source (or maybe just telephone) a particular standout.

Patrick McHale closes the story out with what starts as a genie story and then shifts into something increasingly disturbing. The janky, spiky art is a hard sell at first but what this settles into is a strangely charming story about a roaming spirit, the world’s worst roboticist and a robot with a kill switch. It looks and moves like an anime Christmas special and has a gentle, rounded bounce to the characters and dialogue that’s really charming, especially the excellent voice work by Jordan Jensen and Sungwon Cho. It also has the hardest job to do, bringing the story in to land in a manner that just about ties everything up but is also defiantly its own. If the first story is about surviving as a unique individual and the second is about surviving as an artist, this is about surviving together, building communities and why sometimes bad design is the best design.

Verdict: I loved The Elephant. It’s wickedly smart, vastly kind and looks stunning. I’d love to see more experiments like this. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

The Elephant is on Adult Swim and NOWTV now.

 

Find out more about Maria Bamford here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Bamford

Sungwon Cho here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SungWon_Cho

And Jordan Jensen here, whose excellent standup special, Take Me With You is on Netflix.

https://www.jordanjensencomedy.com/