Bendito Machine II – The Spark of Life
2009 · 6m · España
Directed by Jossie Malis
Genres: animation, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
An improbable hero embarks on a raw journey by land, sea and air among all the attractions of a planet turned into a gigantic petrochemical park — and beyond.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Jossie Malis takes the tired eco-fable and detonates it—a petrochemical planet as theme park, a hero trudging through absurdist spectacle, the whole thing animated in this jagged, deliberately ugly style that makes you *uncomfortable* in the best way. Most scouts would call this preachy; I call it a refusal to let you look away.
The film's lineage runs through Švankmajer and Gilliam, yet Malis stakes her own ground in the formal precision of the sequence design—each environment a closed compositional statement before the next grotesque landscape arrives. The craft is in the discipline of the excess, the restraint within the chaos.
What elevates this from animated manifesto into something alive is the decision to keep the protagonist *small* and *real* against these overwhelming, grotesquely detailed mechanical vistas—that scale choice, and the unflinching sound design of industrial hum and machinery, turns righteous anger into something you feel in your chest rather than your head.