Mammoth: Adventures In Gnomeman's Land

A guy plant, his girlfriend, and his two crazy best-friends have an adventure in the Land of the Gnomemen, where a whole bunch of weird, trippy stuff happens to them, during which the Gnomes try to vanquish a celestial enemy, and group loyalties are put to the test.

Mammoth is just like any other chill, regular, guy plant out there, wanting to take it easy and have a nice time without anyone getting too aggro or in everyone’s face about stuff. Unfortunately, he’s woken up tied to the ground in the Land of the Gnomemen, with his three best-friends beside him, caught underneath the ropes of the devilish little Lilliputians. Before too long, Peyote, the enraged cactus, breaks his bonds, and pretty soon the others have done the same, sending the gnomes running for cover in all directions. From here we are springboarded into a whole host of shenanigans, including some giant beanstalk action, a quest for lost friends, pagan ritualism, and bio-terrorism, where Mammoth and his pals help the Gnomemen out before dealing with their own stuff that appears to be a hangover from past adventures.

In fact, Mammoth: Adventures In Gnomeman’s Land is the ninth such adventure that Mammoth and his pals have been on, Chasing The Rainbow, however this instalment turns out to be a bit of a departure from the rest. In writer/director/producer Matt Check’s animated series, he has taken around thirty-seven minutes to tell all eight of the previous parts to Mammoth’s tale; when he has been Chasing The Rainbow. However, in his Adventures In Gnomeman’s Land, the scale is much greater, with the story perhaps getting away from Check at times, and nearly twenty-four minutes is dedicated to this little escapade alone, making it by far the most important and expansive in the series to date.

It seems as though Check hadn’t really intended for this episode to go on for as long as it did, but as it grew and took shape he found that he was bound to the story for as far as it took him. In fact, it took him a whole thirteen months from start to finish, to get the episode out, which is a huge investment for one man doing everything on his own. The music, too, is composed by Check, and is a huge undertaking along with the animation itself.

What Check has created here, as he says himself, is a valuable form of therapy, where he can disappear into his animation and busy his thoughts with creating this new world, where everything is creatively expressed by him. The adventures of Mammoth are not really so important, as much as what the adventures represent, where each new episode is an achievement in application and skill that provides an outlet for pent-up creative energy to blossom on the screen. Whatever it is that Mammoth and his friends get up to, the sentiment and feelings that come from their actions is always entirely Matt Check, and the camaraderie and closeness that they feel towards each other helps us understand a bit about him.

With no dialogue or lyrics, just the music and the animation to tell the story, Mammoth: Adventures In Gnomeman’s Land ends up sitting in a strange place in film somewhere between Yellow Submarine (1968) and Flow (2024), where it feels like we’re watching an instrumental rock opera with a twenty-four-minute music video. (The band, Mammoth, would definitely be prog-rock.) Realistically, the animation is still pretty basic, with some fairly blocky character movements and little background detail throughout, making it not always easy to tell where the emotions or motivations of the characters are coming from. The music, too, lends itself a lot to children’s TV, with repeating motifs and basic riffs trying to tell us the story, and some of the electronic instruments not always providing the best sound.

Overall, it’s a great achievement in indie production for Check to be creating these animations for people to enjoy, and to have created a series that can still grow and explore new areas and avenues. With Adventures In Gnomeman’s Land ending on a cliffhanger, there’s obvious room for another adventure just around the corner which will continue the tale of Mammoth and his pals, and I’m sure that will be created with just as much care and attention as this one. How many other people will want to come and enjoy Mammoth’s adventures, however, I’m not so sure about, as I wasn’t moved to watch any other episodes after this one.