Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles review: a rudimentary animated making-of

Rare is the animated feature-length film that visualises the life and work of one of the greatest artists of the medium. Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, directed by Salvador Simó, is the animated film in question.

Based on a 2009 graphic novel by the Spanish artist Fermín Solís, it is set in the early 1930s, when Buñuel was dealing with the fallout from the scandal caused by his early surrealist masterpiece L’Age d’Or (1930), and fighting to emerge from the shadow of his collaborator Salvador Dalí. The first labyrinth Buñuel finds himself in is a personal and creative one of his own making: is he a genuine artist, or a trickster riding on Dali’s coat-tails? His struggle to exorcise demons and to achieve his vision is the concern of the remainder of the narrative.

One might expect an animated film about one of the foremost practitioners of cinematic surrealism to conjure a lavish rendition of his dreamlike scenarios and startling visual juxtapositions. In fact, the film has a generally restrained, sober aesthetic, perhaps because its focus is on the production of Buñuel’s early, subversive documentary Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes, 1933) – an outlier in his career but an early canonic entry in nonfiction film. Shots from the original documentary are inserted into the animation as what theorists would call ‘indexical ties to reality’. The story fills in some gaps about Buñuel, his working methods, his collaborators and his art; but at 77 minutes it falls short of nuanced depth and functions more as an introductory lesson.

So many issues are hinted at, but not engaged with, or not mentioned. We only get hints of the complexity of Buñuel’s collaborator Ramón Acín, who used a lottery win to sponsor the film (a visual artist himself, and a committed anarchist, he was murdered by Fascists in 1936 at the outset of the Spanish Civil War).

We hover over the surface of Land Without Bread as a film, in both content and formal concerns; after all, it is one of the most important films in the history of the documentary genre. And Buñuel himself is depicted as a stereotypical – indeed cartoonish – director, not above lying, cheating and stealing to get his film made, of taking advantage of those close to him, or of exploiting his subjects for personal and artistic gain.

The latter facet is essential to the significance of Land Without Bread, an early example of ‘poverty porn’ which walks the line between social engagement and solidarity on the one hand, and sarcasm and exploitation on the other, though not without irony and a touch self-awareness. But this is a blind spot in Simó’s uncomplicated exploration of the material.