Submarine Sandwich
2014 · 2m
Directed by PES
Genres: animation, comedy, experimental
Tones: absurdist, humorous, whimsical
A deli worker builds an entire submarine sandwich out of vintage sporting equipment — boxing gloves, footballs, hockey gloves — sliced on an antique deli slicer in stop-motion.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
PES takes the most obvious thing in the world—a sandwich—and commits so hard to the bit that it becomes genuinely unhinged; the audacity of slicing a football helmet on a deli slicer should be stupid but somehow it's the most logical absurdism I've seen.
A clever visual gag, executed with technical competence in stop-motion, though the premise exhausts itself within the conceit—it's a one-liner stretched to two minutes, however well-constructed that stretching may be.
The genius move is that PES never winks; every sporting object gets treated with absolute deli-counter seriousness by the worker, and that commitment to the mundane logic of ingredient preparation in an impossible context is what makes the absurdity land so hard.
Reviews
I've always loved taking something mundane and transforming it into the unexpected through the animation process. It's pure magic. In Submarine Sandwich, I'm taking all the stuff I've collected — scarred boxing gloves, time-worn footballs, hockey gloves, and chunky baseball mitts — and slicing them up in order to build the tastiest sandwich ever.