Whispers: An Elephants Tale 2000

I'm watching this movie because I have a lot of nostalgia for the movie(it is holding up). My main question is that everything I've found says that only the elephants that portrayed Whispers and his mother were trained. I'm just finding it hard to believe that they could peacefully get the wild elephants to interact so intimately with the trained ones, or more specifically how they could get that close to them with cameras, especially a male trying to push over a tree without crushing a human or a robot camera. To anyone else who has seen this what do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts