Arco (now on Hulu) is one of 2025’s feelgood stories: Animation director Ugo Bienvenu jumps from shorts and comics to his first feature film, and earns an Oscar nomination for his efforts. This family-friendly sci-fi tale about a girl who befriends a boy from the future made its way through major festivals – Cannes first in its native French, then to Toronto with an English dub featuring the voices of Will Ferrell, Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman, who also served as a producer – before finding itself mentioned in the same sentence with fellow nominees Zootopia 2 and winner/pop-culture phenomenon KPop Demon Hunters. Sure, this isn’t the first time a smaller ’toon found itself in the brightest spotlight – it was just a year prior that out-of-nowhere Latvian film Flow won the big award – but for the most part, Bienvenu’s creative endeavor deserves the accolades.
ARCO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: He just wanted to see dinosaurs. What kid wouldn’t? So one night while everyone’s sleeping, Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi, who played young Michael Jackson in Michael) sneaks into his sister’s room and steals her rainbow cape, which allows her to fly, adorned with a special crystal, which allows her to travel through time. She and their parents just got back from seeing honest-to-glob triceratopses, and Arco’s upset. But being 10, he’s not old enough to take such journeys yet. It’s 2932, and Earth’s denizens live on platforms that reach up into the clouds – all the easier for Arco to pull on the cloak and leap into the sky and into the distant past.
He doesn’t go distant enough, though – more on that in a moment. Now it’s 2075. A destructive storm rages, but Earth’s denizens are safe, their homes under bubbles that retract once the violence concludes. Iris lives with her baby brother, cared for by an intelligent robot named Mikki, played by Portman and Ruffalo, whose voices are double-tracked in a nifty stylistic flourish, since they also play their parents. Their parents, who are gone for days at a time working in “the city,” their holograms occasionally dropping in to see how things are going at home. Outside, robot crews clean up the storm damage, and Iris looks up to see a rainbow cutting through the sky. It zigs, then zags. Curious. Rainbows don’t do that, do they?
Answer: No, they don’t. Iris tracks to the literal end of that rainbow and finds Arco dazed and bleeding. She brings him home. Mikki stitches the cut on Arco’s head. Then the robot scans for Arco’s identification and comes to a bizarre conclusion: “You do not exist,” Mikki declares. Then his CPU crashes. Lousy computers. Always going down at inopportune times, e.g., when three children are surely better off supervised than unsupervised. At least Iris knows how to care for her brother, carrying him around in a little clear plastic case that’s like a baby bjorn for dystopian futures with cruddy air quality. Arco and Iris become fast friends, but he’s unsettled – this isn’t his home and this isn’t his time and he lost his time-travel crystal in the crash, but it was found by a weirdo trio of brothers (Ferrell, Adam Sandberg and Flea) seeking to confirm their wacko conspiracy theory about rainbows. These three stooges seek out Arco, adding to the anxiety of the situation: Will he ever get back home to his worried family?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Bienvenu’s significantly influenced by Studio Ghibli, be it visually – think Ponyo or My Neighbor Totoro minus the more beautifully bizarre elements – or in the relatively laid-back storytelling, which reveals the nature of its setting with well-considered implications and seemingly throwaway details. Its Spielbergian components also bring E.T. and A.I. to mind.
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: The likelihood that Ferrell, Sandberg and Flea weren’t in the same room together is depressing. Maybe someone should make that happen? And have a script and camera ready?
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: The Arco story, in all its goofy characters, various chases and somewhat contrived peril, is superficially familiar – if only there was a way for Arco to, you know, phone home, right? But one’s fascination lies less in the plot than the context. Where E.T. was a quiet subtextual treatise on the emotional struggles of children of divorce, Arco ratchets up the existential gloom by depicting a near future of climatic turmoil, and looks 900 years ahead where people essentially live in homes on stilts because, as Arco plaintively puts it, “almost everything is underwater.” Such a statement makes whatever the three nutty comic-relief brothers are up to, malevolent or otherwise, seem trivial.
But the lining of Arco’s cloud is ultimately silver. His depiction of probable/possible futures isn’t surprising, but maybe backstopping a children’s movie with such anxious imagery is – such is the balance of innocence and audacity that makes the film resonant. In 2075, robots are teachers, cops and nannies; in 2932, the family unit is far more intact. But what of the isolation of living atop towers in the clouds, or under plastic domes?
The answer, I’m happy to say, seems to be the sweet and pure connection between Iris and Arco, whose friendship is a little underdeveloped but carries its weight in symbolism. Maybe Bienvenu jabs the bittersweet buttons a bit too hard in the film’s final moments, forcing poignancy instead of letting it simply emerge from the story. But amidst floods and wildfires, and images of holograms sitting down to “dinner” with their children, the filmmaker has the gall to be optimistic. For what represents hope for the future more than children? And what connects their present and future but a full-blown ROY G BIV rainbow? Remember, doom is not a certainty.
Our Call: Wanna bum out a doomer? Show them Arco. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
