Arco Is An Iridescent Time-Travel Story With A Lot On Its Mind
Ugo Bienvenu’s feature debut paints a hopeful future with stunning imagery.
Hollywood’s vision of the future has been unmistakably bleak of late. Where franchises like Star Trek are consistent with their ideas of an eventual utopia, it’s going to take a lot of work — and time — to get to that point. It’s a dismal prophecy to those of us living through the 2020s, an era depicted thoroughly (and not too optimistically) across Star Trek’s history. It’s hard not to succumb to the feeling of doom as our ecological circumstances get dimmer by the day. Thinking about the future is a scary subject. But while stories like Arco don’t shy away from the exercise, the upcoming film does fortunately paint a prettier, more hopeful future with iridescent imagery and a surprisingly mature message.
Directed by Ugo Bienvenu from a script co-written with Félix de Givry, Arco tells a tale of two futures. Part-time travel story, part bittersweet coming of age, the animated film feels like a quiet revolution. While deceptively simple, it’s got a lot on its mind — and though it can’t articulate all of its ideas with equal fervor, it certainly gets bonus points for filtering it all through the lens of its unlikely, era-spanning friendship.
Arco is set in the far-flung future, after a “Great Fallow” sends humanity from their homes on the ground into stilted cities in the sky. This generation has also cracked time travel: anyone over the age of 12 can don a skin-tight pink suit and a rainbow cape and travel at will into the past. It’s this that our titular hero (Christian Convery), not yet 12 years old, covets most of all. While his parents and older sister, Ada, can take a day trip to research dinosaurs in the Jurassic era, Arco has to stay home and mind their family farm. Arco’s opening moments depict a quaint, austere future, splicing home-grown, lo-fi tech with the kind of technological leaps that’d feel more at home in an episode of Star Trek. That understated merging of worlds makes the film feel all the more unique — and it’s a streak that continues when Arco steals his sister’s time-traveling garb in an attempt to prove that he, too, is ready to visit the past.
Though our hero does manage to transport himself back in time, there’s a reason children are forbidden from flying. Arco crash-lands, and later strands himself, in the year 2075 — before the Great Fallow, but after climate change has begun rendering the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. In a quiet suburb in a nondescript town, shields are poised to cover every individual house in the event of an errant wildfire. Robots occupy almost every odd job there is, tending to traffic stops, running schools, and taking care of the children whose parents are away on business. The young Iris (Romy Fay) hasn’t seen her parents (voiced by Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman, who also serves as producer) in months, though they make daily calls via hologram. She and her infant brother are looked after by Mikki, a kindly, older-model android who speaks in the voices of Iris’ mother and father spliced together. It toes the line between ingenious and a little eerie, but it goes a long way in establishing a status quo far removed from our own.
Arco’s mistakes — and his unlikely friendship with Iris — fuel the heart of this story.
In a moment that owes a lot to E.T., Iris encounters Arco in the woods, confused and drifting in and out of consciousness. She has to act fast to protect him from a trio of alien-hunting triplets (voiced by Andy Samberg, Will Ferrell, and Flea) — who seem to come out of nowhere but nonetheless exist to inject Arco with some kid-friendly slapstick. Eventually, we learn that they encountered time travelers just like Arco in their youth, and have dedicated their lives to proving what they saw all those years ago. It might have been a compelling bit of character development, if only it didn’t feel crammed into an already-busy movie. At just 88 minutes, Arco moves at a brisk pace, leaving little room for deeper, more intricate storytelling — much as it may need it.
Iris’ fast friendship with Arco is the heart of this film, and her efforts to help him return to his time takes up the bulk of the action here. With simple, stunning animation and tender performances, it’s easy to buy into their bond. The aspects of Arco that orbit their relationship, on the other hand, feel underbaked and rushed by comparison. It’s a shame, especially once a late-stage twist delivers the kind of emotional gut punch that makes a film like this so special. Bienvenu struggles in juggling Arco’s futuristic setting with fraught coming of age and an earnest love letter to Mother Earth, but you can’t blame the director for taking such a gutsy swing. Arco’s ambitious, heady style has earned comparisons to the films of Hayao Miyazaki, and they’re not unwarranted. It’s just a shame it doesn’t have more time to expand on the intricacies of its sci-fi themes: Bienvenu has clearly put a lot of work into Arco behind the scenes, and it’d have been nice to live in this world a bit longer.
