If you'd never seen the now award-wining stop-motion “Back to the Start” Chipotle commercial set to the music of Willie Nelson's cover of Coldplay's “The Scientist”, you might think that the sustainable burrito chain's newest commercial is groundbreaking. It tells the story of a scarecrow who works for a corporation which represents the evils of the factory farming system.
]
As the commercial progresses, he sees everything that's wrong: chickens being pumped to plumpness with hormones, cows squeezed into boxes, all of the same issues the previous commercial addressed with pigs. And at the end, like the farmer in the first commercial, the CGI scarecrow has an epiphany and decides to take it upon himself to get back to basics.
He picks produce from his own garden, chops it by hand, cooks it himself on a stove and starts, well, what looks like a Chipotle burrito stand. All the while, Fiona Apple croons “Pure Imagination” from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”.
It's a good film and actually meant to promote a game that features the same character, but somehow it lacks the subtle, haiku-like beauty and the resonating message of the first commercial.
But then, other than Aliens, when has a sequel ever been better than the original?
See it below:
Follow Stick a Fork In It on Twitter @ocweeklyfood or on Facebook! And don't forget to download our free Best Of App here!
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.