Pendleton Ward, the creator of a little show you might’ve heard of called Adventure Time, worked on a new Adult Swim animated special called The Elephant. He didn’t make it alone—Ward teamed up with longtime friends and Cartoon Network alumni Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall), and Ian Jones-Quartey (OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes). The show, which saw the Avengers’ line-up of cartoon legends craft something without knowing what each other would contribute, gave Ward the jitters over whether their collective, experimental tale would coalesce into something worthwhile. What frightens Ward the most, though, is his thoughts about AI and how it may leave the animation industry as we know it as a hollow, not-so-exquisite corpse.
Over the course of his career, Ward has built a strong body of work as both a creator who shaped a formative part of an entire generation’s childhood and a champion of animation itself. Through Adventure Time alone, creatives like Sugar got a rocket strapped to their back, launching them into their own career, all while carrying the flame of crafting bold shows of their own that spoke to adults and kids. The gravitational pull of Adventure Time’s elevated arthouse approach to animation—often serving as a cultural bridge, exposing Western audiences to international talent like former Science Saru creative Masaaki Yuasa—embraced creative freedom without hesitation. Ward can easily be credited as one of the bricklayers of this era of highly creative animation, which The Elephant harkens back to. It’s an era that feels on the precipice of dwindling, piece by piece, under the guise of AI as the supposed end-all, be-all of artistic innovation.
Gareth Watkins
After reviewing The Elephant, I walked away with the stark feeling that the special emphatically reached out from beyond my screen, cupped my face, and said, “fuck AI.” When I asked him if that was at all the intent, Ward reminded me that the collaboration was a bit of a misnomer, since he and his peeps couldn’t communicate about what they were contributing to the special’s three acts, not knowing how the whole thing would come together, but trusting that it would be fun.
“What you’re describing is the magic of this piece of art. That there is a meaning [that] emerged from our blind connection of pieces. But in the beginning, all I knew was that I could only get close to feelings of things and not anything too specific,” Ward told me. “‘Cause if you get too specific, you’re creating a wall that may not be passable.”
When I raised the elephant in the room—AI’s looming role in the industry—Ward characterized the magic of The Elephant’s existence as a very cool “last squirt of human creativity.”
“It’s gonna be weird. I think people are gonna like AI, though,” Ward told me. “It’s gonna be heinous in many, many ways, and it’s gonna destroy the industry—but I think people are gonna like it, ultimately.”
Whenever Ward thought about the state of the art in the rise of AI, iron bars came to mind, he said. Ward clarified that it was less about prison and more about the lost appreciation of artistry in our day-to-day lives.
“People used to craft everything. Now, when we look at drywall or something, it means nothing to us. Walls used to be crafted. I think about shaping iron bars. Now, when you walk by those things, they mean nothing because they’ve been industrially manufactured along the factory line,” Ward said. “I feel like that’s going to happen to art at some point, where art’s gonna be this thing that you barely have any appreciation for because it’s all just been generated by machines that have no feelings.”
While there will still be artists, Ward fears it’ll become a niche hobby, with artists reduced to people who whittle wood, making small things that take hours to make.
“It’ll have value in that way, the way that all original works still have value. But it’ll just become a smaller and smaller group of people doing it for a living ‘cause you won’t be able to make money,” he said.
With major animation companies like Disney playing both sides—pearl clutching over protections against AI while partnering with OpenAI for profit—Ward and his motley crew of animators are living through a time when the integrity of their craft is under constant threat. Sure, there’ll always be an animation industry, like there’ll always be journalism. But if you want to break through and be a part of it, you’re gonna have to be okay with being poor and deal with AI debasing your craft and calling it progress.
Ward sees an inkling of a silver lining in AI—at the very least—creating new jobs for humans willing to work there. But he can’t help noticing how broken a future is where artists push their creativity beyond its limits while still trying to sell commercial art, created in a way that is generic enough for people to relate to, only to have that blow up in their face.
“If we're just hired to push the boundaries of art so that AI can eat up all of our ideas and spit them out in different ways, those jobs will become like incredibly creative jobs, because we'll be needing to push the limits of all styles to feed the AI beast and give it more imagination,” he said.
Notice how the left lacks all the soul and whimsical charm that makes the right one so pleasing to look at
— ☝️💥 (@krystalmelodie) December 13, 2025
AI can copy movements but art comes from the human heart https://t.co/MlXmyFXKY7
Despite The Elephant embodying the spirit of a work that’s preserving the soul of animation where human creativity served as the bedrock of its bold and frightening existence, Ward couldn’t help but stifle a laugh when I bluntly asked him if he thought we were cooked. His response, while dour, was brutally honest.
“Kudos to Adult Swim for making cool stuff and having cool choices like making The Elephant. But yeah, we’re cooked,” Ward said. “AI will be implemented at some point because it saves studios money. It just has to happen at some point, and it just keeps getting better. Time’s a changing.”
