This picture may sound like one for the “now I’ve seen everything” file. “Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles” is an animated film about the making of “Las Hurdes” (“Land Without Bread”), Luis Buñuel’s almost grotesquely frank but ultimately compassionate 1933 short documentary about one of Spain’s most economically deprived regions.

But as it happens, this movie, directed by Salvador Simó from a script he wrote with Eligio R. Montero, doesn’t ever pitch itself as a novelty. Its fantastical visions are restricted to those of Buñuel’s own anxiety-steeped dreams. O.K., there are a couple of shots in which Buñuel is dressed as a nun. But the Surrealist provocateur apparently liked to do that for real in the early days.

The movie takes up with the filmmaker as his second collaboration with Salvador Dalí, “L’Age d’Or,” becomes a sufficient succès de scandale in Paris to get him blackballed by the French film industry. He’s intrigued by a documentarian acquaintance who wants him to put his artistic money where his mouth is with respect to changing the world. Soon Buñuel heads to northern Spain, near the border of Portugal, to shoot in mountain villages where the people seem permanently malnourished.