Elephants Dream (2006): cast, story & where to watch

Released in 2006, Elephants Dream is an animation and science fiction film directed by Bassam Kurdali, running about 11 minutes.

What it’s about. Elephants Dream is the story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protege Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect. Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D animated “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite Blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.

Who’s in it. Elephants Dream stars Tygo Gernandt as Proog (voice) and Cas Jansen as Emo (voice).

How it landed. With an audience score of 5.7/10, Elephants Dream has drawn a solid, mixed-to-positive response.

Where to watch. In GB you can rent or buy it from Rakuten TV. See the full, country-by-country breakdown on our where to watch Elephants Dream page.

If you liked it. Fans of Elephants Dream tend to enjoy Spirited Away, Your Name., Grave of the Fireflies and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.