White Plastic Sky

Original Title: Műanyag égbolt

Directed by: Szabó Sarolta, Tibor Bánóczki

Length: 112 min.

Country: Hungary, Slovakia

Year: 2023

Premiere: Berlinale 2023 Panorama

RATING: 4/5

REVIEW

There's a common saying in narrative studies that there is no original story, that everything, from Homer to Joyce, is just a re-elaboration of narrative structures and tropes. This becomes even more lampant when we get down to works in the same genre, or even the same sub-genre, such as dystopian science fiction.

White Plastic Sky does not feature anything unseen before: it imagines a post-apocalyptic wasteland where cities survive under clear domes and people are under a regime that forces them to live 50 years and then takes their "bodies".
Yet, even if several of the elements of White Plastic Sky are familiar - the first 15 minutes being especially reminiscent of In Time, some latter portions are not dissimilar from Oblivion - it is not a film that lets itself be predicted. Not one scene makes it easy to grasp the direction the story is taking, yet the epilogue hits as inevitable and a neccessary outcome. Hope and hopelessness blend in an oddly harmonious mixture, much like the beauty and the barren nature of the scenery seen throughout the film.

The animation tecnique of White Plastic Sky is a rotoscope over live action performances, but unlike previous films that employed the technique, which would have the animation be computer-generated, they employed 2D animators who would drawa and reproduce the scans. Additionally, environments where 3D, a system previously seen in Treasure Planet.

White Plastic Sky is the second slovakian/hungarian co-production of recent years that is also a sci-fi, following Cristina Grosan's Ordinary Failures. Grosan's film is in slovakian, while Banoczki and Szabó's debut is in hungarian.

The hungarian film industry has a long tradition of animation cinema, which dates back to the works of Dargay Attila (Vuk, Ludas Matyi) and Jankovics Marcell (Janos Vitez, White Mare), as well as the international hit Cat City.

review originally published on the instagram page @east.euro_flicks on February 18, 2023.