‘Arco' Review: In Charming, Natalie Portman-Produced French Animated Film, a Boy From the Future Must Find His Way Home

Yahoo

18-05-2025

In Arco, French illustrator Ugo Bienvenu couches a considered meditation on ecological disaster within the dulcet grooves of a charming story about adolescent friendship. The debut feature, which premiered at Cannes as a special screening (and counts Natalie Portman among its producers), follows a 10-year-old boy (voiced by Oscar Tresanini) from the future whose maiden time travel voyage goes terribly awry. He lands in the year 2075, where he meets a girl his age (Margot Ringard Oldra) who tries to help him return home. Their adventure takes place during a critical period in Earth's history and becomes a lesson for both children about the natural world and the enduring impact of meaningful bonds.
This might be Bienvenu's first film, but the director's interest in rendering the future and considering the stakes of technology on humanity stretch back a long time. His graphic novel System Preference, which has already been translated into nearly a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this fall, contemplates a reality in which data becomes a precious commodity and humans must delete important cultural artifacts to make more space for lower-stakes digital storage. An archivist attempts to save critical traditions and artwork by storing the condemned data in the memory of a domestic robot named Mikki.
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Mikki — or at least a version of this yellow and black android — appears in Arco. When we first meet the machine, it's caring for Iris (Oldra) and her infant brother Peter. The non-sentient being functions as a nanny, watching the children when their parents are at work. With the help of some other devices, Mikki (Alma Jodorowsky and Swann Arlaud) is able to project holograms of Iris and Peter's parents (also voiced by Jodorowsky and Arlaud) at the dinner table and during nighttime routines.
Iris' world is filled with the kind of technology that doesn't seem so far off from our present. In the year 2075, humans have outsourced a range of tasks to droids and adapted to unpredictable weather patterns with various tools. Entire neighborhoods are retrofitted with clear glass domes that activate during extreme rainstorms and uncontrollable wildfires. Robots surveil the streets as police officers, educate students as teachers and deliver packages as postal employees. What roles people still play in day-to-day life is not entirely clear.
Working with his skilled team of animators, Bienvenu evokes Iris' world with the detail and bold touch of a realist. Like those 19th-century artists, the director tries to represent his vision of the future with sobriety. He doesn't romanticize a moment at which robots reign and Earth shows even more signs of duress. An obvious point of comparison — both in terms of style and themes — for Bienvenu's work are the animations of Hayao Miyazaki, but the French illustrator's use of bold lines for contouring people and shapes, combined with the detailed landscape, gestures toward more traditional comic inspirations. The director relies on a palette of stark colors to ground Iris' surroundings in ways that give Arco an elegiac mood.
Working from a straightforward screenplay co-written by Félix de Givry, Bienvenu balances the melancholic aesthetics with a narrative filled with optimistic threads. Arco opens in the future, when the titular character's parents and older sister return from a time-traveling trip. In this version of the world, humans live among the clouds in colonies that resemble arboretums. Voyages to different eras help these future societies learn more about what the Earth used to be and what it could provide.
Children under 12 aren't allowed to time-travel yet, but Arco is too impatient to wait two years. As his family sleeps peacefully in anti-gravitational pods, the curious adolescent steals his sister's time-traveling robe — a rainbow-patterned adorned cape — and makes his first trip. The journey doesn't go well and Arco lands in 2075 in the middle of a forest, where Iris comes across his momentarily unconscious body. She saves him from a group of siblings — Frankie (William Lebghil), Dougie (Vincent Macaigne) and Stewie (Louis Garrel) — who have spent their lives trying to prove the existence of these otherworldly rainbow people. Their gadgets direct them to where Arco rests just a few meters away, but Iris, quick on her feet, lies to them. Once the coast is clear, she takes Arco back to her house.
These two children quickly forge a bond built on mutual curiosity and a shared love of nature. Despite an initial reluctance to break a key rule of time travel (people from the past shouldn't know anything about the future), Arco shares bits of information about himself. He tells Iris about the events that led to humans living in the tree houses and how he really shouldn't have stolen his sister's cape. He also gives Iris, who loves birds, mini-lessons on how to speak to the creatures. In turn, Iris teaches Arco how to fit into the current era and helps him try to get back home.
It's clear that Arco staves off Iris' loneliness while the young girl inspires the boy from the future. Close-ups of the characters' expressive faces add a meaningful layer to the film. One does wish that Arco had a clearer logic around its own science-fiction principals, especially when it comes to how time passes in the past versus the future. A later thread, which involves Mikki translating his memories, begins to address larger questions about cultural and historical preservation, but that, too, comes off as less developed than other plot points.
As Arco and Iris try to recreate the necessary weather conditions for Arco's flight (it must be raining and sunny at the same time), the residents of their town prepare for a dangerous wildfire. Meanwhile, Iris' friend Clifford (Nathanaël Perrot), suspicious of this boy whom Iris introduced as a cousin, tries to figure out what she's trying to hide.
Bienvenu and de Givry effectively build a hopeful climate change story around these little dramas of adolescent friendship and loneliness. The looming environmental disaster is reflected in emergency drills and empty grocery store aisles. There's a haunting quality to this, especially considering how much of contemporary life it mirrors, but like Claude Barras' galvanizing animated feature Savages, which premiered at Cannes last year, Arco roots for a future in which humans do survive. The film aims to inspire action and stave off despair with a reminder that the most powerful tool younger generations can wield is their imagination.
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