(Check out Chris Reed’s Arco movie review, it’s in theaters now via Neon. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Time travel films always force the viewer to decide how much they want to allow the inevitable narrative contradictions posed by visiting the past without altering the future to distract. Arco, a beautiful new animated film from French director Ugo Bienvenu, making his feature debut, is no exception. Given how original everything else in the story feels, we forgive that cinematic dilemma in favor of a celebration of the rest. The journey, in this case, is well worth the worry.
Arco lives in an unspecified century far beyond ours, when the planet’s human inhabitants live in cloud dwellings while the land below lies fallow, recovering from abuse and subsequent climate devastation. He’s not quite 12, the age when his society allows its citizens to don their rainbow suits and fly through the air, as well as through time. Like all rebellious youths who have come before, Arco can’t quite wait his turn, taking action with profound consequences.
Iris lives in 2075. Her world is dominated by sentient caretaker robots and devastating storms, the houses in her neighborhood protected from the worst effects thanks to advanced technology that surrounds them in self-contained bubbles (a metaphor for the ostrich-like qualities of our species if there ever was one). Her parents are mostly absent, leaving her and baby brother Peter in the care of an android nanny, Mikki. Wishing desperately for something in her life to change, Iris is surprised to see a rainbow come down from the sky and seemingly crash in the nearby woods.
It’s not a leprechaun, but Arco, who has miscalculated his time travel. All he wanted to do was see dinosaurs, and here he is only back in 2075. Worse, the diamond that makes such temporal displacement possible falls off the suit, recovered on the ground not by Iris, but an odd trio of brothers who once saw a similar rainbow figure and now obsess about discovering who or what it was.
The two children soon become friends, discovering a kinship in their pre-teen loneliness. As Iris struggles to help Arco return home, he in turn teaches her how to talk to birds and regales her with tales of his home. All the while, the adult world—and not just the brothers—conspires to make sense of Arco and keep Iris and him apart. The stakes are high, and the repercussions of Iris and Arco’s defiance of the rules are significant. They each will learn serious lessons about cause and effect.
Watching the 2D animation is its own kind of time-travel experience, evoking nostalgia for another (albeit less vividly colorful), earlier French film, the 1973 Fantastic Planet, as well as other works of that period. The careful construction of an era not that distant from ours also impresses, and though the mechanics and technology of Arco’s future make little sense, the imagination behind them carries the day. Much here is a wonder to behold.
I’ve checked out the film twice now, the first time with the English dub and the second time in the French original. I preferred the latter, if only because I was not kicked out of the movie by recognizing the voices of such well-known comic actors as Will Ferrell and Andy Samberg (who nevertheless do a solid job in their roles). But no matter which language you choose, Arco proves a moving, thrilling experience, filled with genuine, earned emotion and wildly enjoyable flights of fancy.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
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