Arco
by Hope Madden
A child who can’t wait to grow up goes against his parents’ wishes and stumbles head long into a dangerous adventure. Between the family-film formula for its plot and the hand-drawn animation, Ugo Bienvenu and Gilles Cazaux’s Oscar nominated Arco feels like it comes from another time. And that’s a lot of its charm, because the retro-futuristic vibe balances a delightful vintage SciFi quality with a disconcerting reality.
Arco (voice in English by Juliano Valdo, in French by Oscar Tresanini) is a boy from the distant future who, sort of accidentally, travels back in time to 2075 where he crash lands in the life of a lonely little girl named Iris (Romy Fay/Margot Ringard Oldra).
With her parents working in the city, joining by hologram for dinners and bedtime, Iris spends most of her time with a nanny robot named Mikki, and a toddler brother named Peter. But Arco shakes up her world, offering connection and companionship she’s been missing. Together, they’ll figure out how to get him back to his time before it’s too late.
Again, the premise itself is not that unusual. It’s essentially E.T.
Bienvenu, writing with Félix de Givry, livens up the story with the loony humor of a bumbling threesome bent on finding the rainbow boy. They’d seen a boy just like him as children, and nobody believed them. Now they want proof.
The bowl cuts and rainbow sunglasses mark the characters—voiced in English by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea—as harmless goofballs, but they serve more purpose than simply comic relief.
The miracle the filmmakers conjure with Arco is that the childlike wonder of the characters, the wholesome storyline, and the beautiful animation belie the absolute bleakness of the film’s context. The world around Iris is literally on fire, a danger that Bienvenu illustrates with lush ferocity and amplifies with a daring, feverishly paced third act.
Those two worlds—hopeful wonder and bleak reality—inevitably collide, and though Act 3 resolves as you likely expect it to, it taps into the bittersweet emotion and timeless hope that marks all great family films.
