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The Surreal Spirit Of Salvador Simo Busom’s Buñuel In The Labyrinth Of The Turtles
An animated movie by GKIDS Films about one of the great iconoclasts and rebels of the cinema is fittingly surreal when the subject in question is Luis Buñuel. The Spanish master has been conjured in numerous movies about other people over the years, from his comic-light appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris to Little Ashes, an altogether not uninteresting drama about Buñuel’s broken friendship with Salvador Dali. That, too, was a surreal experience in that Dali was interpreted no less by Robert Pattinson. I have to report, however, that this new animated feature, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, is till now the best dramatization of Buñuel’s early years, since it’s illustrated approach is free to imagine the master’s mind as a landscape of distorting dreams while still wisely interpreting the world around him. Director Salvador Simo also understands something elemental about Surrealism as a movement: that it was not simply about trippy images but, perhaps more so, about the revolutionary transformation of life and the world.
Simo begins this story in the Paris of the early 30s when the world was still emerging from that cataclysmic wave of cultural transformation of which World War I was the detonator. Buñuel (voiced by Jorge Uson), then a…
