Bendito Machine III – Obey his commands
2009 · 7m · España
Directed by Jossie Malis
Genres: animation, satire, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
An improbable hero embarks on a crude journey by land, sea and air across a planet turned into a gigantic petrochemical park — and beyond.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A petrochemical wasteland as the backdrop for an absurdist odyssey—this is the kind of premise that makes you rewind and ask if you're watching satire or prophecy, and Malis commits hard enough to the weirdness that it doesn't matter. Crude animation + maximalist environmental despair = the exact kind of subversive stuff everyone else walks past.
Bendito Machine III positions itself squarely in the lineage of political animation—Švankmajer, early Aardman—but Malis's decision to render the entire world as a grotesque industrial landscape shows formal restraint in service of a clear conceptual argument, every frame economical and deliberate.
The genius move here is treating the animation's rawness not as a limitation but as thematic language: that crude, almost hostile visual texture makes the journey feel genuinely provisional, at risk, which a polished version would instantly undercut—and that choice alone transforms what could be preachy satire into something genuinely unsettling.