The Elephant, Adult Swim’s latest animated special, asks what happens when the Avengers of Cartoon Network—creatives who shaped a generation’s sense of humor and childhoods—unite. Not to churn out a legacy sequel or serve as filler in a streamer’s neglected catalog, but to speak directly to that generation and lapsed viewers alike.
The result is an anomaly: a collective effort by Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time), Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall), and Ian Jones-Quartey (OK K.O! Let’s Be Heroes), proving they can still awe and deliver life lessons that cut into adulthood as sharply as they once did for childhood.
The special, clocking in at just over 20 minutes, sees viewers join the creators in not knowing how their project will coalesce. After all, just because you have favorite foods doesn’t mean they’ll pair well as a meal without having your guts bubbling from your own hubris. Likewise, The Elephant is, in essence, Western animation legends playing Telestrations on a grand stage.
On paper, the risk of failure feels precarious—sure, the weight of its creatives is no small factor. Still, if their visions didn’t amalgamate successfully, the result could clash rather than gel into a visual peanut butter and jelly sandwich that viewers (and, more glaringly, corporate overseers) would bite into. Hence, why experiments of this nature usually surface in tentpole franchise anthology projects, where artists don’t have to hot-potato “yes-anding” each other’s work.
The special not only brings the above creators together but also sees three animation studios in Rudo, Dinamita, and Titmouse Vancouver flex their artistic muscles in a jam-packed experimental narrative. On a literal level, The Elephant follows a nameless protagonist who tumbles out of a mysterious factory by freak accident and embarks on a journey of self-discovery and agency. Meanwhile, the setting of said journey shifts kaleidoscopically from sci-fi video‑gamey backdrops to soft, painterly Little Golden Book‑style illustrations and beyond—each trippy locale transformation materializing on a dime as part of its plucky hero’s internal and existential odyssey.
Aside from being a clever play on the “Blind Men and the Elephant” parable, wherein three blind men who’ve never come across the gentle beast try to ascertain what it is through touch, The Elephant carries all the charm emblematic of its creators’ past works, sprinkled with a few disarmingly funny bits of swearing that never feel out of place—after all, the generation who grew up with these voices are adults now. At the same time, the special finds a way to guide its nameless protagonist—the elephant—through lessons that speak directly to creativity and agency.
Here, new-age adages feel genuine: picking up a pencil and letting one’s imagination run wild, rather than outsourcing creativity to AI to mechanically hallucinate playing for you; discovering value in oneself beyond the pigeonholes imposed by others; and daring to ask more of life. It’s all quite heady, yet its skillful creators’ collaged message is a clever, decadently illustrated approach to moral storytelling—brief, unreservedly playful, yet never preachy, while being organically didactic.

What makes The Elephant remarkable, though, is that it works. It’s also remarkable that it exists at all. In an era where animation is treated less like a museum tapestry of a streamer’s catalogue and more like appendages bisected and shuffled around by companies in a rights-holder shell game, a project this unreservedly playful feels virtually unheard of. The Elephant‘s mere existence as uninhibited art is especially prescient given the recent developments around Adult Swim’s parent company and its historic string of masterful gambits, with formative shows under its own banner being cut from the lineup.
The Elephant stands out as a rare act of creative trust and freedom to play that’s as metatextually inspiring as its throughline moral about agency is potent, even when presented in three acts, with no idea how they’d all mesh into a single, complete work. A beautiful anomaly that insists animation is at its most beautiful when it’s an experimental collaboration built on trust, whose existence is thrust into being by the tried-and-true venture for a soul-stirring narrative, not corporate inventory.
The Elephant premieres ad-free on Adult Swim on December 19 and streams the next day on HBO Max.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Source link
#Elephant #Delivers #Blissfully #Playful #Collaboration #Cartoon #Network #Legends
![Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/black-hole-hierarchial-mergers-1280x853.jpg)
Post Comment