{"id":101404,"date":"2025-12-19T17:17:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T17:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/101404\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T17:17:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T17:17:14","slug":"the-elephant-review-a-captivating-special-about-reincarnation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/101404\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Elephant’ review: A captivating special about reincarnation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Animation is an art of the impossible, though it often settles for the ordinary. Much of what comprises adult animation merely translates into line what might be shown in live action \u2014 humans in human settings. Which is fine. Some great shows fit that bill \u2014 \u201cKing of the Hill<\/a>\u201d and \u201cBob\u2019s Burgers<\/a>,\u201d for example. Still, there are infinite avenues to explore, and so it\u2019s good to have Adult Swim, the network that once produced a series whose heroes are a meatball, a shake and a bag of fries, still making aesthetic trouble.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Elephant,\u201d which premieres Friday on the network, and Saturday on HBO Max alongside a documentary on its creation, \u201cBehind the Elephant,\u201d is an animated take on exquisite corpse, the old surrealist game in which three artists contribute the head, torso or legs of a single figure, folding the paper so as not to see what the others had drawn. This project enlists four fab animators over three acts \u2014 \u201cAdventure Time\u201d<\/a> creator Pendleton Ward, Ian Jones-Quartey (\u201cOK K.O.! Let\u2019s Be Heroes\u201d<\/a>), Rebecca Sugar (\u201cSteven Universe\u201d<\/a>) and Patrick McHale (\u201cOver the Garden Wall\u201d<\/a>) \u2014 to make something that not only had we not seen before, but none of them had either, until their independently produced parts were put together. All are \u201cAdventure Time\u201d vets, as are Jack Pendarvis and Kent Osborne, who conceived the idea, served as \u201cgame keepers,\u201d and share story credit with the animators.<\/p>\n

Exquisite corpse was also used in character design. It invariably produces monsters, if amusing ones, which explains why the character \u2014 let\u2019s call her The Character \u2014 in Ward\u2019s act has a cactus for an arm and a giant pink foot in place of one leg. In the Jones-Quartey and Sugar act, she has robot arms, fishnet stockings and a \u201cmusic button\u201d in her chest (the city parties when its disco plays), and in McHale\u2019s, a TV for a torso. One regards The Character as the same person in each act, and through changes that occur within each act \u2014 identity, death and reincarnation are at the heart of the show. She\u2019s always different, though always the protagonist. (And seemingly female.) Which is not surprising if you\u2019ve ever watched \u201cAdventure Time,\u201d where even every villain is also a protagonist.<\/p>\n

Ward takes the first act; Jones-Quartey and Sugar, who are married, worked together on the second; and McHale brings it home with Act 3. Ward\u2019s section is easily recognizable as his work in its mix of the uncanny and the offhand, both from \u201cAdventure Time\u201d and the psychedelic \u201cMidnight Gospel.\u201d Sugar and Jones-Quartey opt for a New Wave angularity far from their usual styles, and McHale cycles through several looks until his Character, who arrives already hoping to get off this wheel of endless rebirth and cease to exist, settles down for a spell in a realistically portrayed city in the snow \u2014 New York, I\u2019d say \u2014 in conversation with a lonely inventor. McHale also brings in, for just a few seconds, the eponymous elephant in an apropos reference to the parable of the blind men who imagined that animal to be a different sort of beast depending on where they laid their hands.<\/p>\n

Each animator (or team) integrates their position in the game \u2014 and the nature of the game itself \u2014 into their storytelling. Ward\u2019s Character, born onscreen, wonders \u201cWhat am I? I\u2019m not sure.\u201d In the second section, Sugar and Jones-Quartey have their narrating Character say, \u201cI could feel my existence stretching in both directions, back to the nothingness before anything happened and forward to the nothingness after everything is over. And if everything has a beginning and also a end then this was just the middle.\u201d By virtue of owning the conclusion, and it\u2019s a moving one, McHale brings order to the whole; given the scattered process, and the changes between and within each section, it feels remarkably cohesive and intentional. But metamorphosis is the soul of animation.<\/p>\n

If \u201cThe Elephant,\u201d described by the network as \u201ca creative experience,\u201d had appeared before it was already published, it would have certainly joined four other animated series \u2014 three from Adult Swim \u2014 on my list of 2025 favorites<\/a>. It demands a second viewing, and you\u2019ll want to watch \u201cBehind the Elephant\u201d to learn more. You may want to watch that twice as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Animation is an art of the impossible, though it often settles for the ordinary. Much of what comprises…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1871,55263,55268,55259,55260,55266,55264,55267,55269,48,52,51,47,50,49,55261,5848,55265,45927,55262,36914],"class_list":["post-101404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-act","tag-adventure-time","tag-animation","tag-character-design","tag-elephant","tag-exquisite-corpse","tag-fab-animator","tag-game-keeper","tag-great-show","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mchale","tag-network","tag-reincarnation","tag-section","tag-sugar-act","tag-ward"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}