Hand-drawn animation carries a quiet science-fiction love story through the ruins of a future Budapest in White Plastic Sky, a 2023 Hungarian-Slovak feature built on a striking, melancholy premise about survival at any cost.
What is White Plastic Sky about?
By 2123 the planet's ecosystems have collapsed, and the city that remains standing has struck a grim bargain to keep its people fed: at fifty, every citizen is transplanted into a tree, their body sustaining a system that feeds the rest. Stefan is a therapist who has spent his career helping neighbors accept that fate. When his wife Nora is called in early for her own transplantation, he refuses the arrangement he has counseled others to embrace, and the couple flees into the wasteland beyond the city walls searching for a way to undo what has already been set in motion. The animation renders that world through a mix of rotoscoped live-action performance and stark, desaturated backgrounds, giving the film's science-fiction imagery an unusually grounded, human weight. Rather than building a sprawling dystopia for its own sake, the story stays close to one marriage under impossible pressure, using the premise to ask what a couple owes each other when survival itself has a price.
About the cast
Zsófia Szamosi and Tamás Keresztes lead the voice cast as the central couple, with Géza D. Hegedűs, Judit Schell, István Znamenák, Zsolt Nagy, Márton Patkós, and Renátó Olasz rounding out the ensemble that inhabits the film's rendered version of Budapest.
Context & significance
Directors Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó built the project as a Hungarian-Slovak co-production, and the film traveled through animation festival circuits after its 2023 catalogue release, drawing attention for a rotoscope technique that blends filmed performance with illustrated environments rather than leaning on conventional CGI. That approach places White Plastic Sky closer to European art-animation traditions than to mainstream studio sci-fi, and it uses the format to sit with grief and denial in a way live action rarely attempts at this scale.
Watching White Plastic Sky on Ktime
White Plastic Sky streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles available, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the film in either format. The page itself is free to browse; watching the film requires only a free K-Time account login, part of a catalogue built around Farsi-language access for the Iranian diaspora.