Bendito Machine I: Everything You Need
2006 · 5m · Spain
Directed by Jossie Malis
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: absurdist, dark, darkly comic, mythic
Two silhouetted primitive tribes war over a sacred hill and the glowing machine deity that dispenses eyeballs, in a wordless allegory about technology worship and resource competition.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
No dialogue, no explanations, just black silhouettes beating each other senseless over a machine-god — Malis invented an entire cosmology and delivered it in five minutes.
Malis' silhouette-allegory is closer to a Lotte Reiniger update than to 2001 — wordless, mythic, primitive in the best sense. A confident debut chapter in a saga I'd happily watch the rest of.
Wordless silhouette animation where primitive creatures worship technology as god — Jossie Malis built a six-film saga out of this. Five minutes of pure allegory; the lineage tracks all the way back to Fantastic Planet.