Pelikan Blue

 

Original title: Kék Pelikán

Directed by: Csáki László

Length: 80 min.

Country: Hungary

Year: 2024

Premiere: Annecy Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: inspired by real events, three young boys discover a way to forge expensive tickets and travel abroad, during the end of the Cold War.

RATING: 3.5/5

REVIEW

Pelikan Blue is the ultimate proof that all cinematic norms are nothing but conventions, and that cinema can leave them behind to unlock new narrative possibilities. While Csáki's debut is certainly not perfect, it is a film that dares to do something unique, and that is commendable.

Inspired by a series of interviews, the film follows the story of three young hungarian boys, who, during the end of the Cold War, figured a way to forge tickets to travel abroad, in the west, and the consequences to which their discovery leads. It's really an incredibly cinematic story, comparable to that of great fictional tricksters, petty criminals with legendary records, and that sheds a new light on the late '80s era of the fall of the Berlin wall as seen by the young generation of the time. 

A story with a narrative potential so strong that it could practically work regardless of the form it is narrated in. Thus, the choice of narrating it with the visual language of animation, and the narrative conventions of the documentary - voice over extracts of interviews, archive footage (present only as audio) - makes for quite an unique work. Pelikan Blue is marketed as an animation documentary, but it really mainly proves that there is no such thing as a clear distinction between fiction and documentary, as it is perfectly possible to dramatize a real story to an extent that it is almost a work of fiction. 

The film and the marketing insists on the "true" nature of the story, and the source is unquestionably real, but the storytelling becomes so well crafted, paced and executed that one cannot see Pelikan Blue without the same sort of attitude that is given to fiction, and the artificial reconstruction, dramatisation is so deep that the film is something that can't be clearly considered fiction or reality - that is not to say that Csáki is a fraudster and the film is an invention, but that, as much as the forged tickets of the film, it uses as its basis truth, to reconstruct it in an artificial framework. It is a point of strength, as it demonstrates a dose of courage from the author in shaping reality and fiction.

The animation, 2D digital, might not be everyone's cup of tea: the design resembles the purposefully aesthetically unpleasant works that can be seen on adultswim, to underline the mature and irriverent nature of the story. Pelikan Blue is clearly targeted at a teen-adult audience, and this had to be definitely doubled down through its form. Nonetheless, the film is brilliant in employing all the visual abstraction that can be possible through the animated form, sometimes with hilarious results.

That is ultimately the success of Pelikan Blue: it is entertaining and fun, and manages to be so while also being rooted in techniques commonly associated with a form that is mostly considered informative rather than entertaining. Almost like the three protagonists, the film challenges and circumvents any standard, and lays the foundation to reflections on cinema theory that might lead to interesting outcomes.