"going to the store" and its sequels are a series of Surreal Humor Web Animations by filmmaker and CGI artist David Lewandowski. The original was made as a short for the Everything anthology series on Channel 101, and it became so popular online that David followed it with two sequels.
The videos consist of a featureless CGI male mannequin erratically walking, dancing, and contorting unnaturally towards some destination, set to a piece of synthesizer music by Jean-Jacques Perrey. Each new video features some form of Serial Escalation: the second, "late for meeting", throws the man's physics-defying car into the mix, and the third, "time for sushi", has the man joined by an identically featureless CGI woman before they're joined by an entire stampede of mannequins.
David has also opened a store for selling (currently sold out) merch
, one of which is YouTube Inbox, a book consisting entirely of every confused or potentially exploitative private message he received in the seven years following the first video's release. The store also includes sarcastic pages for selling the series' or the book's movie rights to interested film studios.
Not to be confused with the trope Going to the Store.
going to the videos:
- "going to the store" (2011) - Set to "Little Ships"
- "late for meeting" (2014) - Set to "Mexican Cactus"
- "time for sushi" (2017) - Set to "Dynamoog"
time for tropes:
- all lowercase letters: The titles of every video are lowercase, in pure internet surreal comedy fashion.
- Deranged Animation: An example of deranged 3D animation set over real-life backdrops. Physics and bodily limits are entirely optional when you're a CG mannequin.
- Me's a Crowd: "time for sushi" reveals a gigantic swarm of identical mannequins overtaking Japan.
- Mind Screw: A physics-uninclined CGI model wobbles and warps down the street to the tune of 1960s proto-Synth-Pop. Yeah.
- Serial Escalation: Each video is more complicated and absurd than the last. "late for meeting" adds equally-physically-impossible car driving, and "time for sushi" goes further with a thundering herd of mannequins and a train that travels even more chaotically than the car.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: The first "going to the store" ends before the mannequin ever gets there. "late for meeting" starts with him having arrived, but when he presumably realizes he's late for said meeting, he launches his groceries into the air and glitches off down the street without them.
- Surreal Humor: A famous example of Surreal Comedy's resurgence on the internet. The videos are funny because they're inexplicable nonsense.
- Uncanny Valley: Invoked by the featureless, unemotive CGI mannequins, their absurd bodily movements, and the remarkably high attention to detail in inserting them into real-world settings.
