March 7th - PES Fresh Guacamole (2012 Oscar Nominee)

Today is the anniversary of a brief yet stylish and impactful animated short. Fresh Guacamole Is a 2012 short film from the stop motion director PES. With a runtime of a little under two minutes, this film has the world record for the shortest film nominated for an Oscar. The plot of the short is simple, it's just the motions of making guacamole. The thing that makes the short what it is, is that all the Ingredients are inanimate objects which are stop-motion animated into being ingredients.

While you can find a lot of animations fitting that description nowadays, PES is the director who developed the subgenre. Fresh Guacamole itself is a sequel to a previous short in the exact style, 2008's "Western Spaghetti". Along with a third "Submarine Sandwich" short in 2014, you have a simple and very replicable style of animated short, and a lot of independent animators decided to take their own spins on PES' style of animation. In particular, You can find a lot of stuff combining PES' fake food cooking style mixed with Lego stop motion. Also it's impossible to brush these derivative animations as mere knock-offs when they still use an absurd amount of effort to illustrate the act of cooking.