Man serenades woman whist sitting on an elephant

When a wealthy real estate company, backed by a powerful minister decides to build a township in a reserve forest area, it cuts off access to the water body to the elephants living in the area, endangering their lives. An eco-warrior decides to fight for their cause at a time when nobody else would.

Elephant, Elephant, Elephant! an immersive animation experience, hand drawn into a 360o environment, it plays with our anthropomorphism of elephants, initially delighting the audience with the clumsy elefunks performing incongruous circus tricks to the pompous music of the Thai Elephant Orchestra; they then transform back into ‘real’ elephants, whose stereotypical actions taken from zoo strangely appear like they are dancing and greeting each other. The illusion broken, the suspension of disbelief is exposed it signals the beginning of the elephant’s poetic escape leaving us alone in the dark.

This story began with a blind, bull elephant called Pla-Ra. Paul Barton took his piano to ElephantsWorld, a Sanctuary on the banks of the River Kwai in Thailand and began playing to the elephants while they were eating. "They were all having Barna Grass and it was that time of the day, when the elephants get to eat a lot and they don't waste a moment because they know that moment won't last forever," Paul recalls. "Pla-Ra was behind the piano with a mouthful of barna grass and I started to play Beethoven. Pla-Ra was chewing, and as soon as I played the first chords, he stopped eating with stalks of Barna grass protruding from each side of his mouth, and that's the way he stayed until the end of the piece." "Each time I played music for Pla-Ra, whether flute or piano, there was an identical reaction. Pla-Ra would stand for a while, and then he would curl his trunk and hold his trunk in his mouth until the piece was over. No matter how long that piece was, he would stay like that." ...