Fresh Guacamole

I really lived it but almost 2 minutes isn't enough to get u oscar

This is a very short film and indeed one of the reasons it appears to have had so many votes and comments on IMDb is that it is known for being the shortest film ever nominated for an Oscar. The film is about a man making guacamole, dicing up the ingredients, mixing them and ultimately serving them up with chips. The method of delivery of this is live-action stop-motion animation (for which the correct term is pixilation) and we see other objects being used in the place of the regular food stuffs – so for example a hand grenade instead of an avocado, poker chips instead of potato chips. Additionally when something is "diced" with a knife, it literally becomes a load of dice.

As a short stop-motion film it is very cool and I liked a lot the way it takes odd ideas and runs with them. We all have things flash into our minds at times, whether it is the obvious stuff like a banana being held like a gun, and essentially that film takes these silly connections and makes them work – so the starting point is that an avocado reminds the maker of a hand grenade and it goes from there. The animation is impressively smooth which is very hard to do when working with real people as we are here. The transition to dice and smaller dice is also impressively done.

In terms of the Oscar nomination I'm not sure why this film was selected when there are so many great stop-motion projects out there, but then in fairness I am not really sure how the Academy narrows the field down to a short list for nomination. I take the nomination of a film like this as recognition not just for this specific project, but rather acknowledgement and highlight of the many great little short films out there that are free of the pressure to return big profits and instead can focus on creativity and seeing what works and what can be done. Fresh Guacamole is such a film – short, creative, fun and technically impressive, I hope it serves as a gateway for viewers to other similar cool stop-motion projects.

I just recently caught this mind blowing little short (and I do mean short..only 2 minutes)at a festival of Academy Award nominated short animated films. Despite the short running time, I laughed my a** off, big time. It's basically some kind of (very)surreal cooking show,where a pair of hands whips up a batch of Guacamole,using all kinds of household objects not associated with food. The results are pretty wacky (in a good way,of course). Veteran stop motion animator PES (who also did equal justice to cooking up a bowl of pasta in his earlier short, 'Western Spaghetti')weaves a few trippy moments of silliness (and also pulls down a cameo as the pair of hands) that some will get giggles from,others...probably not so (it depends on the grasp of surrealism). Not rated by the MPAA,but nothing to offend the staunchest of bluenoses

I won't do any describing of this because it will sound ridiculous. But in reality, it is a seamless, outrageous little two minutes that will be hard to forget. Every little bit fits magically into what seems like an actual recipe; it is colorful and unique in every way.

'FRESH GUACAMOLE': Three Stars (Out of Five)

This 2 minute 2012 animated short film was nominated for a 2013 Academy Award. It was written and directed by PES and is about making guacamole from different objects around the house (that aren't edible), including dice and poker chips to name a few. PES also directed the 2008 critically acclaimed stop-motion short film 'WESTERN SPAGHETTI', about making spaghetti from different objects. Somewhat amusing and colorful but I don't know if it's Oscar worthy. As far as the animation goes I guess possibly so but there's no story here, it's just an animated cooking video with different objects.

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