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OK, Joe, thanks for the feedback. It it indeed a bit bulky (but what else
can you expect from an Elephant...?)

Flattening the backside, to make the ears thin, and thus indeed more like
ears, has the disadvantage that the backside looks more like a traffic
sign than a Chess piece. Perhaps it would give a better effect if the ears
were made thin by cutting away two other vertical cylinders behind them,
just as is already done to create the face, so that the top look would be
something like a square with 4 quarter disks, centered at the 4 corners,
cut out of it. (The disks on the front side having a slightly larger
radius than those on the back, so that the 'neck' is thicker than the
trunk.)

The ears would still cause it to have a very massive and prominent frontal
view, though. This could be reduced by making it smaller size, but OTOH, it
would look a bit silly to have a small Elephant next to a big Horse. In
some variants, the Elephant is only a very minor piece. (Shatranj, where
it apears as the Alfil, and even worse, Xiangqi, where it cannot even jump
or cross the river.) In other variants it is used for F+A, which has
approximately Knight value. In Superchess it is a quite strong piece (a
Mastodon that can capture to pieces at once). Of course in Mastodon Chess,
one would be likely to use this physical piece to represent the Mastodon.
In these latter variants, the impressive appearence of the piece is quite
justified.

In fact it is not really true that the size of a piece is related to its
power in play: a normal Chess set is designed based on esthetics. The
Rookis smaller than Knight or Bishop, while there is no doubt that it is
the stronger piece.