“What if rainbows were people from the future travelling in time?” is the sort of tagline that will make many punters run for the hills, but Ugo Bienvenu’s colourful, soulful sci-fi animation threatens to make skygazers and daydreamers out of anyone who deigns to take the trip. Arco is a boy from a far-flung future where humans live among the clouds, in harmony with nature. They’ve also cracked the conundrum of time travel and wear flowing, technicolour capes to arc across the sky and puncture the fabric of time and space. Such adventures, we discover, are only to be enjoyed by those over 12, but that doesn’t stop young Arco, who swipes his older sister’s suit and embarks on a solo voyage into the unknown. His destination is a time much closer to ours, in the comparatively near-future of 2075, where he crash lands into the life of a spirited, imaginative girl called Iris.
Until now, Bienvenu has distinguished himself across short films, music videos, bandes dessinées and brand collabs, developing a distinctive personal style that blends bold, vibrant design and an idiosyncratic approach to sci-fi motifs. His feature debut is equal parts polished and particular, whimsical and weird.
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As the pair of youngsters conspire to get Arco home, we can delight in the details of the film’s eccentric vision of 50 years from now: a seasoning of robot butlers, bubble cars and candy-coloured gadgets on top of a familiar suburban landscape. By 2075, though, the climate catastrophe is at Iris’s doorstep. Curfews and protective domes keep the raging forest fires and apocalyptic storms at bay, but it’s clearly a futile, short-term fix. The world is ending all around her, yet this strange boy out of time, who can speak with birds and is bewildered by supermarkets and electricity pylons, appears with a lifeline.
Arco’s environmentalist bent, from pleasant pillow shots of babbling brooks and leafy glades to spectacular scenes of natural disasters, initially recalls the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Where Arco departs from Miyazaki, though, is how it offers an alternative to the legendary Japanese grouch’s recurring narrative framework. Miyazaki’s films from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Princess Mononoke, create conflict between a halcyon, pre-industrial past and the world-blighting greed of humanity – with young people tasked with finding beauty in the rubble. In Arco, though, Iris’s near-future landscape may be on fire, but Arco’s distant-future is an eco-conscious idyll worth dreaming into existence.
This is primary-colour, major-key storytelling. It is disarming, charming and unafraid to be sincere – especially when it comes to the sparks of inspiration, creativity and connection that are so fundamental to human existence. Stick with it, and the final stretch of its barely 90-minute runtime crams in enough emotional payoffs and thematic flashpoints to fuel a library of sci-fi stories. Yet what rings true is its unswerving faith in the ingenuity of future generations and a hope that the youth of today will build a better world tomorrow.