PES - Fresh Guacamole - Critical Account
“What I really like about stop motion animation, what draws me so much to this medium, is that everything in front of the camera is completely real. There’s no digital trickery. Everything is 100% believable because they are objects and it’s a photographic medium.”
Adam Pesapane, or PES, is an globally celebrated animation filmmaker who grew up in New Jersey, USA. His career is defined by his portfolio of thoughtful and unique stop-motion short films and commercials which highlight his style of relating everyday objects in unrelated activities. His work has attracted audiences of tens of millions of people, as his films are specifically designed to encourage people to replay his films, in order to catch hidden meanings. Under two minutes in length, PES’s short Fresh Guacamole (2012) has gathered over 42 million views after publishing online.
Adam Pesapane
Pesapane grew up in a family that encouraged his artistic talents and abilities, and in high school, was able to stage his own portraits and illustrations. Despite studying English literature at the University of Virginia, he discovered and become enthralled in printmaking during his years at college, and was employed as an assistant to a creative director in New York, where he was then exposed to the filmmaking industry. When Pesapane saw a screening of The Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) by Jan Švankmajer, a Czech animator, he “marvelled at a person pulling off a feature film without any words and became curious about this stop-motion technique”. After realising that “a commercial was just a tight story”, Pesapane started to create his own freestanding short films, that was based around the structure of condensed storytelling but didn’t have a logo at the end. His films were more exploratory than the mainstream films as they were all “like experiments that [he] want[ed] to conduct just to see if it works.” His main objective was to give the audience an alternative perspective on the world, and to provide “a five degree tweak in something we take only one way.”
Having already created a large portfolio of short films, and obtaining a substantial global audience, PES produced Fresh Guacamole in 2012. In discussion about the creation of this film, Pesapane says that “it comes back to a single idea I’ve always had… I see a pile of avocados. I’ve always had this little fantasy of grabbing one and throwing it and blowing a whole store up.” Once this initial idea of a grenade representing an avocado was established, Pesapane then developed the idea to make a whole dish composed of similar ideas. In the pre-production stage of the film, where he was developing the concept, he will “see something in an object and think it looks like something else. It’s just something my brain does naturally.”
In Fresh Guacamole, Pesapane touches on the issue of money and gambling in today’s society, through his choice of objects that represent the ingredients in the ‘recipe’ for guacamole. True to his globally appreciated style, Pesapane uses recognisable objects that aren’t situationally relevant, however, in Fresh Guacamole, unlike many of his other films, all of these items hold a resemblance and connection to games and money, for example, dice, Monopoly houses, and poker chips. This highlights the idea that society has classified money as equal in necessity to food and cannot get enough of it. The choice of subject matter also brings light to the idea of “playing with your food” as the game pieces are used as the ingredients for the guacamole. Fresh Guacamole inspired my works to be more succinct and fluid in the transition between frames, which meant I needed to create more frames and play them at a higher frame rate.
Amongst many outstanding artists in the world today, PES manages to sustain a devoted audience by engaging them in his unique and distinctive style of filmmaking. His films are unlike other works as he believes they “draw a lot more from the heritage of advertising than from narrative storytelling.” Pesapane expands on this by saying that his films “don’t necessarily traffic in human emotions, character development or arcs, they’re more idea based.” Pesapane is more interested in telling a joke or conveying a certain idea, rather than developing a character. Another thing that is consistent in Pesapane’s filmmaking is how significantly short and elaborate his films are. His works are known for their re-watchability because of their short length and how “there are things that people might miss the first time and if they watch again they discover some of the hidden things in the background.”
In conclusion, Adam Pesapane’s unique and eccentric filmmaking style has attracted large global audiences online and established him as one of the most celebrated animators in the world. His use of repurposing objects to represent other things, and the awards and recognition he has received as a result of this attest to his creative and innovative practice and brilliance in the field of animation filmmaking.