Playgrounds
2019 · 5m · United Kingdom
Directed by Antonio Milo, Fabrizio Fioretti
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A CG-animated trip back to the early '90s suburbs, where kids with absent parents escape into other worlds where they can't be found.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent nostalgia piece with a melancholic veneer, but the premise—kids escaping into fantasy—lands exactly where you'd expect it to, and the CG execution doesn't subvert anything about the form itself; worth watching, sure, but it's not asking the right questions.
Milo and Fioretti demonstrate assured control of tone and visual language, situating their suburban reverie within a lineage of animation that takes childhood memory seriously—the formal restraint in how they render absence is the real craft move here.
The decision to shoot the real world in desaturated, almost documentary-style CG and reserve saturation for the fantasy escapes creates an immediate visual grammar that does the emotional work without explanation—that single chromatic choice elevates what could've been saccharine into something genuinely haunting.