In this film, we position the (Democrat) Donkey and (Republican) Elephant as friends, rather than adversaries. The two parties' mascots are in the same boat, literally. We see that even though they’re saying the right things, their actions don’t reflect it. It’s a short but poignant look at the state of our polarized politics.

The two main political parties in America, the Democrats and the Republicans, have long been represented by animal mascots, the Donkey and the Elephant. But as both the political climate and news networks have become more and more partisan, it seems that Donkeys and Elephants are the only way we’ve been seeing each other lately. A campaign that played to the middle was a refreshing approach.

We needed a breakthrough look. We harkened back to the origin of the Donkey and Elephant—the classic political newspaper cartoons with a distinct pen-and-ink style. We designed our characters in their image. Then we molded them into clay and hand-painted them to look like their illustrated 2D inspiration. We shot our 3D models in stop-motion, then superimposed them back into a 2D illustrated world to create a fresh take on an old medium.