Within the early 1900s, someday between the tip of World Conflict I and the beginning of WWII, a bunch of surrealist artists obtained collectively and invented a recreation. In Beautiful Corpse, a small group works collectively to attract an image or write a brief story. The catch is you can solely see the very finish of regardless of the earlier individual contributed — simply sufficient to attach your picture or phrases to what got here earlier than with out having any thought what you’re responding to. The outcomes are sometimes bizarre, humorous, and nonsensical.
Considerably lately, Vishnu Athreya was fascinated about Beautiful Corpse. Athreya is a senior vice chairman at Warner Bros. Animation, and he was making an attempt to provide you with a brand new thought for an animated challenge. He wished to usher in a number of nice animators and have them every contribute their very own quick to a bigger story with out having any thought what the remainder of it’d appear to be. In different phrases, he wished to make an Beautiful Corpse cartoon.
The result’s The Elephant, streaming now on HBO Max. This psychedelic, 23-minute-long animated particular consists of three wildly disparate acts. The items loosely match collectively, however they’re finest loved as a triptych of visually and tonally distinct tales:
- A futuristic, video game-inspired opening act comes from Journey Time creator Pendleton Ward
- A recent, music-focused center act by Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe) and Ian-Jones-Quartey (OK Ok.O.! Let’s Be Heroes)
- A comfy, nostalgia-tinged last act from Patrick McHale (Over the Backyard Wall)
The 4 animators, who all additionally labored on Journey Time at one level or one other, rapidly agreed to Athreya’s pitch and his strict guidelines, which said that there could possibly be zero dialog or shared info between the group about their respective acts. Then, they got down to discover any loophole they might to convey a little bit of construction to this absurd project.
“We type of gave one another the little issues forwards and backwards,” Ward tells Polygon.
How did they do it? The connections and clues are delicate, however when you see them, you’ll admire The Elephant on a complete different stage. Polygon spoke to Ward and McHale about how they dealt with the unimaginable process of constructing a cartoon collectively with out truly with the ability to talk.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for The Elephant.]
Earlier than getting began, the very first thing the group of animators did was sit down and play a conventional recreation of Beautiful Corpse. Collectively, they drew three freakish characters after which every picked one to function their protagonist. In addition they agreed to at least one narrative rule: every act needed to finish with the primary character dying in order that they could possibly be reborn into a brand new physique within the subsequent entry.
For McHale, this posed a number of challenges. For one factor, he wasn’t significantly enamored together with his character, a Frankenstein monster with further limbs poking out in random instructions.
“I used to be the final to select from our three character designs, and mine was tremendous weird-looking,” McHale tells Polygon by way of electronic mail.
His resolution? Kill her off virtually instantly.
This additionally gave McHale a approach to reinforce the themes of loss of life and rebirth that have been alleged to run by The Elephant. Within the opening moments of his phase, we see the protagonist die and reincarnate a number of occasions, earlier than she finds herself caught within the physique of a poorly made robotic. This scene served as a backup, in case the opposite animators welched on their promise to kill off their characters.
“I assumed I might create a story security web for myself by exhibiting a fast sequence of lives and deaths to reestablish that idea and ensure the ending made some sense,” McHale says.
Whereas McHale was making an attempt to verify The Elephant made sense, Ward was busy throwing in an additional factor of chaos. Athreya had assigned two “Gamekeepers” to fastidiously monitor and censor any communication between the animators. So Ward got here up with a loophole.
“I wished to do a jam comedian,” Ward says, referencing the artistic course of the place a number of comedian ebook artists collaborate on a single problem. “I wished to attempt to talk with the others. So I invented a tool that would ship a message by my act into one other act.”
That “system” is a cartoon mousetrap, which seems on the finish of Ward’s act, whereas his “message” is a scrap of paper with a easy drawing of two birds on it that lands on the mousetrap within the opening phase’s last shot. Ward handed alongside a replica of that drawing to Sugar and Jones-Quartey (by way of the Gamepeekers), hoping they’d incorporate the drawing and even share it with McHale.
This didn’t precisely go as deliberate. Sugar and Joones-Quartey integrated Ward’s picture into their phase, the place it exhibits up pinned to a board of clues, however that’s the final time we see the jam comedian. It by no means seems in McHale’s act.
“Nevertheless they used it could be cool,” Ward says. “I used to be like, Possibly they will burn it for kindling. I wasn’t certain what they’d do with my jam comedian, however I despatched it ahead.”
Ward hints that there are different tiny Easter eggs connecting the three acts. For instance, maintain an eye fixed out for a “rune” that Sugar and Quartley handed again to Ward, which exhibits up within the cave on the finish of The Elephant’s first act.
With no actual thought what preceded him (regardless of Ward’s finest efforts to ship alongside a secret message), McHale confronted the troublesome problem of bringing this chaotic three-part story to a satisfying conclusion. He tried a number of concepts, a few of which have been “very excessive idea,” earlier than touchdown on one thing a lot less complicated.
“I assumed it could be finest to only embrace a small character story quite than attempt to make sense of all the large conceptual stuff,” he says.
McHale’s act feels probably the most grounded of the three, slowing down the frenetic tone of the earlier acts for a captivating romantic comedy when the protagonist will get reincarnated as a robotic and begins to fall in love together with his inventor. It’s a surprisingly becoming finish to what can typically really feel like a borderline indescribable challenge.
“Just about each determination I made was simply in service of making an attempt to not utterly embarrass myself by ruining the movie and losing everybody’s time,” McHale says.
In the long run, he did greater than that. McHale, Ward, Sugar, and Jones-Quartey got here collectively (type of) to create one thing particular and distinctive that their followers can revisit for years to come back. And whereas Athreya deserves a lot of the reward for assembling this dream-time of animators, it’s the way in which the group tried to bend and break the foundations of their project that makes watching The Elephant such a rewarding expertise.
The Elephant is streaming on HBO Max.
