Aria Covamonas’s La gran historia de la filosofía occidental (The Great History of Western Philosophy) (2025) is less a retelling of philosophical thought than a radical détournement from it—a fever dream where ideology, art, and absurdity collide. In this animated feature, a cosmic animator is tasked by the Central Committee to create a definitive philosophical film under the ever-watchful gaze of Chairman Mao. But when Mao rejects the project and orders the animator’s execution, Comrade Monkey—an anarchic spirit in the lineage of Sun Wukong—leaps into action to subvert fate.

Covamonas’s technique is as much the subject as the narrative itself. Constructed through a Dadaist-style collage, the film layers public domain images and archival audio into a frenetic, irreverent tapestry, recalling the anarchic spirit of early avant-garde cinema. Dialogue in dubbed Chinese, paired with subversive subtitles, adds another level of distortion—it slips, mutates, and multiplies, forcing the viewer to navigate an unstable terrain of interpretation.

Premiering in competition at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Great History of Western Philosophy has been hailed as a riotous, boundary-defying work that both honours and dismantles the grand traditions of intellectual history. As philosopher-kings and ideological spectres clash in a universe where animation is a weapon, Covamonas asks: Who has the right to tell history, and who gets to survive it?