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According to Hungarian animator duo Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó, we have only a century until the dessicated, infertile dystopia of their animated festival hit “White Plastic Sky” becomes our reality. A few years ago, this grave and wistful film’s 2123 setting would have seemed hyperbolic, but the rapidity with which we seem to be hurtling toward environmental collapse recently makes its parched landscapes — it could be the surface of Mars but for the rusted hulls of ships jutting up like tombstones from arid lakebeds — seem only a mild exaggeration of the wastelands our literal grandchildren might have to call home.

Mirroring an animation style in which the somnolent characters are less expressive than the richly detailed, vanishing-point backgrounds however, it is harder to believe in Bánóczki and Szabó’s vision of transformation undergone in the human psyche in an equivalent time frame. In this 2123, life can only be supported...

Impressively bleak animated Hungarian sci-fi feature White Plastic Sky imagines a grim dystopia a hundred years from now where, like in Soylent Green (1973), older people are harvested at age 50, turned into trees so that they can become food for the younger generation. Except in this movie, the high-tech cannibalism is no state secret waiting to be blurted out by Charlton Heston, but a fact of life universally accepted phlegmatically by all. It only becomes a problem for protagonist Stefan (Tamas Keresztes) when his wife Nora (Zsofia Szamosi) decides to undergo the “implantation” procedure at age 32, having lost the will to live since the death of their child.

Made using a striking blend of rotoscope-traced live actors and intricate CG-drawn background designs to build a richly detailed world, this could build a cult following off a warm reception in Berlin.

Rotoscoping is a technique that dates back to the earliest days...

The first few minutes of White Plastic Sky, the animated feature from Hungarian directors Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó that debuted at the Berlin Film Festival 2023, sketch a future world with echoes of past cinematic dystopias.

The world has been stripped of life, the soil poisoned, and all animals driven to extinction. Humanity survives under a huge geodesic dome (the plastic sky of the title) and has learned to feed on itself. At the age of 50, every citizen gets a special implant that turns them into a food source for the next generation. In a scene resembling the pod farms of the Matrix films, we see how implanted humans are transmogrified into a hybrid plant species, becoming trees that provide oxygen and food for those under the dome.

“There are similarities in our story to Soylent Green or Logan’s Run, similar motifs to other high-concept, or hardcore science fiction,” admits Bánóczki,...