‘Arco' Review: France's Answer to Studio Ghibli Offers an Emotional Sci-Fi Epic
That animated triumph premiered to raves at Cannes in 2024 and slowly built momentum until finally winning the Best Animated Feature Oscar earlier this year. For all Cannes represents to global cinema, it had never been a particularly fecund environment for animation: The festival used to play host to splashy premieres for blockbuster hits such as 'Shrek 2' and 'Bee Movie,' not eventual Academy Award winners. 'Flow' changed all that. What would Cannes do for animation next?
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This writer is no Oscar prognosticator, but it seems 'Arco' is unlikely to repeat that triumph. Not that it isn't a worthy film — though not as worthy as the wordlessly universal 'Flow,' which, at times, truly feels like a movie that's never been made before — but the path that movie took feels almost unreplicatable.
For one, 'Arco,' with its copious French dialogue and unmistakably Gallic sensibility (even if dubs into other languages do eventually happen) simply doesn't have the borderless resonance. For another, it simply wears its influences on its cinematic sleeve a little too readily: A little bit of 'Peter Pan,' 'E.T.,' Studio Ghibli, even 'Star Trek' — with director Ugo Bienvenu's stated aim of presenting a positive, hopeful vision of the future in 'Arco,' and the colorful palette with which he's realized it, Roddenberry Entertainment should seriously consider coming onboard as producing partners for the U.S. release. It's that level of optimistic.
As Bienvenu's first feature, 'Arco' is undoubtedly a promising start for a budding auteur who's been toiling away at short films, music videos, graphic novels, and short animations for Hermès. One of his illustrations for the French luxury house became a popular scarf called 'Wow!' which gave a comic book sensibility to the equestrian images associated with the brand. He has an eye for detail that calls to mind Ghibli, as well as the great French artist Jean Giraud, known to the world as Mœbius. But Bienvenu embraces an explosion of color that's all his own.
'Arco' introduces us to a young boy of 10 or 11 living in a far future where humanity now resides among the clouds on 'Jetsons'-like platforms on stilts. At a certain point, the population of Earth realized that a 'Great Fallow' needed to happen, that the surface of the planet needed to rest. We meet Arco himself giving feed to chickens and pouring food in a trough for pigs. This may be an extremely advanced civilization he's part of, but it's also back to basics. And soon, we discover that people, once they turn the age of 12, don a rainbow cloak with a special light-refracting diamond, and use the colorful garment to fly through the air — and go back in time.
Arco isn't old enough yet to fly, but that isn't going to stop him. He steals his sister's cloak while the rest of the family is sleeping and jumps off the edge of the platform.
After that, we're introduced to a raven-haired girl of about the same age named Iris. She's living on the ground in a suburban community where her primary caregiver is a robot named Mikki, and bubble-like shields pop up over everyone's homes when the climate-change-fueled thunderstorms wreak havoc or devastating wildfires break out. Her parents, consumed with work, are never even home and communicate with Iris merely by 'Star Wars'-style blue-grain holograms. Iris has a caring companion in Mikki — she asks him to play cowboy and Captain Hook, and he obliges — but she still dreams of something more fulfilling. And into her life drops Arco.
Yes, Iris is living in Arco's past even if it's our future. The year for her is 2075, and the environmentally ravaged earth she inhabits is definitely a place that needs a 'Great Fallow.' The story from there becomes a tad predictable: Arco is a fish out of water, Iris quickly becomes his devoted friend, a misunderstanding causes them to go on the run. And some choices don't quite work, like the monochromatically-attired, turtleneck-wearing identical triplets who are tracking Arco — having before seen visitors from the future like him, who fly in the sky and leave rainbow trails behind them, the brothers are determined to prove their existence — and are in the story as just a particularly French kind of comic relief.
As in any story like this, Iris is both trying to help Arco get home, and also doesn't really want him to leave. But Bienvenu comes up with a stirring ending, one so emotional it almost paves over the bumps in the narrative road that got us there. But it's undoubtedly a bit of connecting the dots to get to that ending, something genuinely soulful that's a bit reduced because of a plot that just went from Point A to Point B.
Still, much of the film is absolute retina candy. Like 'Flow' director Gints Zilbalodis, Bienvenu built his studio around recent graduates of top animation schools, and there is a youthful energy pointing to new possibilities for the medium. He also has a unique idea animating his entire vision: Why do visions of the future have to be uniformly grim? Can't they be full of wonder also? That said, it's important to stay a bit clear-eyed about the way things are, too. Like Gene Roddenberry, Bienvenu is imagining a hopeful far-future, and a pretty miserable near-future that's a continuation of our miserable present (oh yeah, the 'Star Trek' creator foretold that the 21st century would be rough).
The path ahead may be full of peril, but hope might still wait on the other side of that rainbow. And Bienvenu certainly gives us hope that animation can continue to be a vessel for epic visions and intimate musings, and can be one of the most deeply personal forms of cinematic expression there is. The artistic intentions couldn't be better. Maybe with the next film, the ability to better realize them will follow.
'Arco' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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