Animated Short of the Day: "Western Spaghetti" (Pes, 2008)

Animated Short of the Day is an ongoing series showcasing short cartoons from every possible genre, era, and format. For an archive of the films previously featured, click here. To suggest cartoons for future installments, email me or contact me on Twitter.

At just 1 minute and 42 seconds, "Western Spaghetti" is the shortest film I've featured so far in this series. But it packs an astonishing number of great sight gags into that brief running time. Marvel as typical household items stand in for typical household foods! Thrill to the stop-motion so meticulous it kind of looks like live-action!

(Admittedly, the presence of the director's actual hands in many shots helps that second illusion.)

Pes (actual name Adam Pesapane) is one of my favorite animators working today. In theory, his style is simple. He always tells tiny (really tiny - this is one of his longest films) stories using stop-motion and found items. However, his films offer endlessly inventive variations on that theme. In each one, there are always small joys to be found.

I could discuss some of my favorites from this cartoon - the squished tomatoes, say, or the transition from hard to cooked pasta - but doing so would only subtract from the illusion.

So instead I'll offer a document that subtracts from the illusion in a much more illuminating way. Pes himself wrote this article from Make magazine detailing the process that went into the creation of the short (link downloads a folder which contains a PDF of the article.)