Arco

From its very first prismatic stroke in the sky, Arco, directed by Ugo Bienvenu, promises to be a rare, hand-drawn work: a fable about time travel that carries with it the soft rustling of paper and graphite. Co-written with Félix de Givry, the film takes up the well-worn theme of the child outside of time and refracts it through a resolutely optimistic prism, less apocalyptic and more pragmatic. Arco imagines a distant future in which the Earth has been left to rest after the Great Fallow, but it also takes us back to 2075, where wildfire domes flash above dead ends and a robot nanny named Mikki persuades holographic parents to stick to a bedtime routine. This dual exposure—a pastoral future nestled within a busy near future—sets the film's pace. We feel it from the outset: a boy watches from a techno-agrarian farm on stilts as his family returns through rainbows, dragging snippets of prehistory like contraband pollen. The fantasy is disarmingly tactile, and the moral imagination is clear: technology is not an enemy to be destroyed, but a tool that must learn to share space with trees, books, and children.

In terms of animation, the film is a marvel of controlled freedom. The characters are sharp and legible, the sets are full of detail, and the rainbow capes undulate like living stained glass. There are obvious influences: the ecological lyricism of Hayao Miyazaki, the meteorological romanticism of Makoto Shinkai, a touch of René Laloux's psychedelia, and even the documentary clarity of the comic books that Jean Giraud once pushed to the limits of dreams. But Arco is never content to be a pastiche. The movements are energetic, the contours retain a human touch, and the film relies on a handcrafted rhythm at a time when animation is too often polished to the point of anonymity. Credit goes to animation director Adam Sillard, whose elastic staging makes the film's action legible without erasing its peculiarities, and to composer Arnaud Toulon, whose music rises and falls like the weather, never content to merely underscore emotions, but giving the scenes a meteorological atmosphere. In the English-dubbed version, which will allow many to discover the film, Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo infuse their voices with genuine tenderness, while Andy Samberg, Will Ferrell, and Flea deliver the comic riffs with a deliberately broad touch.

The plot is beautifully simple: Arco, voiced with boundless impatience by Christian Convery (in the French versions, by Oscar Tresanini), steals the rainbow device he is too young to use and crashes in 2075, where Iris, played with down-to-earth warmth by Romy Fay (in French: Margot Ringard Oldra), finds him collapsed in a smoke-filled forest. Their first encounter is almost silent, a lovely staging in which she shields him from view while a trio of self-proclaimed alien hunters search the bushes. This initial choreography—fear, curiosity, keen attention—sets the tone for a friendship that the film refuses to sentimentalize. Iris is solitary but not fragile, pragmatic as children become when adults externalize their affection toward productivity apps. Arco, despite his bravado, is a child who has seen too big; he must learn humility before he can relearn how to fly. Their alliance is based on an exchange: Iris teaches him how to go unnoticed in 2075; Arco teaches her how to “read” birdsong, a small, luminous idea that the film returns to exactly when it needs air.

 If there is a formal gamble here, it is on the tone. Ugo Bienvenu mixes coming of age, slapstick, and eco-futurism, and the weaving doesn't always hold together. The clumsy brothers—Frankie, Dougie, and Stewie, voiced respectively by William Lebghil, Vincent Macaigne, and Louis Garrel in French, and Andy Samberg, Will Ferrell, and Flea in English—have flashes of charm and a late revelation that almost justifies their obsession. Yet they undermine the tension whenever the story needs it most, turning a chase sequence into a comedy sketch. Elsewhere, the film explains where it could trust the audience's feelings: a few didactic passages about domes, data, and climate sorting resemble footnotes slipped into the dialogue. The result is a meandering middle section—never aimless, but sometimes overly explanatory—before the film tightens its grip for a powerful finale. None of this breaks the spell, but you can sense a first-time director trying to juggle too many brilliant ideas at once.

What really works is Mikki. Voiced in French by Alma Jodorowsky and Swann Arlaud, the yellow and black android borrows its DNA from Ugo Bienvenu's graphic novel System Preference and appears on screen as one of the most discreetly radical recent representations of domestic AI. Mikki speaks with assembled parental tones, not as a gag, but as a thesis: technology can be an instrument of care when it remembers that it is a substitute, not a replacement. Observe the stasis in the dinner scenes where the holographic parents appear and disappear; Mikki never steals the show, never begs for a soul, never becomes sinister. She is content to feed the children, keep bedtime rituals intact, and keep the memory of home alive. In a genre addicted to AI panic, this choice is almost subversive. It aligns the film with the best of Mamoru Hosoda's human futurism, without copying its rhythms.

The sets are staged with a clear momentum, but two of them linger. In the holographic classroom, as Iris's lesson moves from abstraction to embodied discovery, we sense the film's educational philosophy taking shape: learning through play, playing as an ethic of attention. Then, the climax, edited during a firestorm that paints the suburbs with copper and ash, sees Arco and Iris create the precise weather conditions for a rainbow: rain and sun, danger and grace. It's a spectacle with a purpose, a reminder that weather in this film is never just a backdrop; it's a character, a consequence, and a clock. The sequence culminates in a choice that is both inevitable and heartbreaking, and the film has the good sense to end on a bittersweet note rather than a thesis statement. I found myself thinking of Ari Folman's The Congress and Gints Zilbalodis' Flow: films where the image continues to speak after the plot has ended.

For all its elegance, Arco is not flawless. The science fiction mechanisms—how time stretches between eras, what the Grand Member actually entails—remain deliberately vague. Some will find this liberating, others will wish that Ugo Bienvenu and Félix de Givry had tightened up the rules a little. And although the English version of the film (with Natalie Portman as producer and voice actress alongside Mark Ruffalo) broadens its audience, the script sometimes explains what the animation already communicates. Nevertheless, when the brushstrokes are so vivid, this excessive articulation becomes a forgivable tic, like a storyteller too eager to make sure the back rows can hear his whispers.

What ultimately elevates Arco is its refusal to condescend to its young audience or flatter its older audience. It treats children as moral agents and adults as fallible beings, and it gently insists that responsible stewardship is a verb. In a seemingly innocuous moment, Iris remarks that no one goes to the library anymore; a few scenes later, a bird lands on the rainbow cape, as if to approve of this counterargument. This sums up the film in miniature: the conviction that attention—paid to language, to living beings, to the past we inherit and the future we owe—can still change the course of things. Imperfect, luminous, and resolutely hand-drawn, Arco does not reinvent the wheel of time travel; it reminds us why we build them in the first place: so that two children from different centuries can find each other and, for a few breathless minutes, turn the world together.

Arco
Directed by Ugo Bienvenu
Written by Ugo Bienvenu, Félix de Givry
Produced by Ugo Bienvenu, Félix de Givry, Sophie Mas, Natalie Portman
Starring Swann Arlaud, Alma Jodorowsky, Margot Ringard Oldra, Oscar Tresanini, Vincent Macaigne, Louis Garrel, William Lebghil, Oxmo Puccino
Edited by Nathan Jacquard
Music by Arnaud Toulon
Production companies: Remembers, Mountain A
Distributed by Diaphana Distribution (France), NEON (United States)
Release dates: October 22, 2025 (France), November 14, 2025 (United States)
Running time: 82 minutes

Seen on October 9 at Max Linder Panorama 2025 at Max Linder Panorama

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