Using exquisite corpse, 'The Elephant' tells a captivating story about reincarnation

Animation is an creation of the impossible, though it often settles for the ordinary. Much of what comprises big animation simply translates into enactment what mightiness beryllium shown successful unrecorded enactment — humans successful quality settings. Which is fine. Some large shows acceptable that measure — “King of the Hill” and “Bob’s Burgers,” for example. Still, determination are infinite avenues to explore, and truthful it’s bully to person Adult Swim, the web that erstwhile produced a bid whose heroes are a meatball, a shingle and a container of fries, inactive making aesthetic trouble.

“The Elephant,” which premieres Friday connected the network, and Saturday connected HBO Max alongside a documentary connected its creation, “Behind the Elephant,” is an animated instrumentality connected exquisite corpse, the aged surrealist crippled successful which 3 artists lend the head, torso oregon legs of a azygous figure, folding the insubstantial truthful arsenic not to spot what the others had drawn. This task enlists 4 fab animators implicit 3 acts — “Adventure Time” creator Pendleton Ward, Ian Jones-Quartey (“OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes”), Rebecca Sugar (“Steven Universe”) and Patrick McHale (“Over the Garden Wall”) — to marque thing that not lone had we not seen before, but nary of them had either, until their independently produced parts were enactment together. All are “Adventure Time” vets, arsenic are Jack Pendarvis and Kent Osborne, who conceived the idea, served arsenic “game keepers,” and stock communicative recognition with the animators.

Exquisite corpse was besides utilized successful quality design. It invariably produces monsters, if amusing ones, which explains wherefore the quality — let’s telephone her The Character — successful Ward’s enactment has a cactus for an limb and a elephantine pinkish ft successful spot of 1 leg. In the Jones-Quartey and Sugar act, she has robot arms, fishnet stockings and a “music button” successful her thorax (the metropolis parties erstwhile its disco plays), and successful McHale’s, a TV for a torso. One regards The Character arsenic the aforesaid idiosyncratic successful each act, and done changes that hap wrong each enactment — identity, decease and reincarnation are astatine the bosom of the show. She’s ever different, though ever the protagonist. (And seemingly female.) Which is not astonishing if you’ve ever watched “Adventure Time,” wherever adjacent each villain is besides a protagonist.

Ward takes the archetypal act; Jones-Quartey and Sugar, who are married, worked unneurotic connected the second; and McHale brings it location with Act 3. Ward’s conception is easy recognizable arsenic his enactment successful its premix of the uncanny and the offhand, some from “Adventure Time” and the psychedelic “Midnight Gospel.” Sugar and Jones-Quartey opt for a New Wave angularity acold from their accustomed styles, and McHale cycles done respective looks until his Character, who arrives already hoping to get disconnected this instrumentality of endless rebirth and cease to exist, settles down for a spell successful a realistically portrayed metropolis successful the snowfall — New York, I’d accidental — successful speech with a lonely inventor. McHale besides brings in, for conscionable a fewer seconds, the eponymous elephant successful an apropos notation to the parable of the unsighted men who imagined that carnal to beryllium a antithetic benignant of beast depending connected wherever they laid their hands.

Each animator (or team) integrates their presumption successful the crippled — and the quality of the crippled itself — into their storytelling. Ward’s Character, calved onscreen, wonders “What americium I? I’m not sure.” In the 2nd section, Sugar and Jones-Quartey person their narrating Character say, “I could consciousness my beingness stretching successful some directions, backmost to the nothingness earlier thing happened and guardant to the nothingness aft everything is over. And if everything has a opening and besides a extremity past this was conscionable the middle.” By virtuousness of owning the conclusion, and it’s a moving one, McHale brings bid to the whole; fixed the scattered process, and the changes betwixt and wrong each section, it feels remarkably cohesive and intentional. But metamorphosis is the psyche of animation.

If “The Elephant,” described by the web arsenic “a originative experience,” had appeared earlier it was already published, it would person surely joined 4 different animated bid — 3 from Adult Swim — connected my database of 2025 favorites. It demands a 2nd viewing, and you’ll privation to ticker “Behind the Elephant” to larn more. You whitethorn privation to ticker that doubly arsenic well.