Even in the endlessly eccentric annals of independent animation — where the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” took flight and Ralph Bakshi tripped out amid jive-talking rabbits and X-rated cats — “Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles” is an oddity: a feature-length cartoon about the making of a 27-minute documentary.
Frankly, it was a brilliant choice on the part of director Salvador Simo to use such an expressionistic medium to examine how surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel bent reality to his own ends in the making of 1933 documentary “Las Hurdes” (aka “Land Without Bread”).Of course, animation later proved fertile ground for Buñuel’s friend — and fellow surrealist — Salvador Dalí (who designed “Destino” for Disney), seeing as the hand-drawn form is uniquely suited to what André Breton described as the surrealists’ aim: “to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” As many have observed about the medium,
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