©Courtesy of Neon
Even in the far future, kids would be much better off minding their parents. The titular Arco learns that the hard way. He wanted to see dinosaurs, which sounds ridiculously irresponsible. Instead, he gets lost in time, crashing into the year 2075. At this point of human development, androids do the work humans can’t be bothered with. For Iris’s parents, that includes raising her. However, her lack of adult supervision gives Iris the opportunity to help the distressed time traveler in Ugo Bienvenu’s Arco, a freshly minted Oscar nominee for best animated feature, opening this Friday in theaters.
Centuries from now, environmental disaster renders the Earth’s surface uninhabitable, but it hardly matters. Humanity survives just fine, living in vining terrace-structures built into the clouds. They also harvest resources through time travel. Much to Arco’s frustration, journeying back in time is forbidden for those under twelve-years-old. Nevertheless, the ten-year-old boy wants to see dinosaurs, so he steals his big sister’s time travel cloak and the crystal that powers his family’s time jaunts. Yet, through inexperience and negligence, he ends up in 2075. To make matters worse, he somehow loses the precious crystal on impact.
Even Iris has trouble believing Arco is from the future, while the very notion temporarily crashes her robo-nanny Mikki’s operating system. However, UFO-chasing brothers Frankie, Dougie, and Stewie immediately realize he is not of their world. They recognize his cloak’s distinctive rainbow trails. In fact, previously witnessing similar aerial phenomenon launched their sad alien obsession. Therefore, they desperately want to capture Arco to prove they have not wasted years of their lives acting like misguided cranks.
©Courtesy of Neon
Frustratingly, the three loser siblings bring far more cringe than added-value to Arco. Somewhat jarringly, they turn on a dime in the third act, reinventing themselves into good guys, rather than villains, but their personalities, such as they are, remain off-putting. Arguably, the shticky trio are poorly served by the all-star English voice cast, Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea, all of whom sound charmless and abrasively neurotic. Their bickering scenes call for liberal use of the mute button.
In fact, slow pacing bedevils the first half of the film. Nevertheless, Bienvenu really gives the audience an emotional walloping during the third act. Ultimately, the film fully explores the potentially heart-breaking possibilities of time travel, in ways somewhat reminiscent of Nolan’s Relativity-themed Interstellar. Bienvenu and co-screenwriter Felix de Givry also delve into speculative bounds between flesh-and-blood children and their prospective AI-caretakers, in a manner similar to Kogonada’s After Yang.
Towards that end, Bienvenu’s clever technique combining the voices of both vocal cast-members portraying Iris’s parents—Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo for the English-language dubbing—adds compelling dimensions to Mikki’s relationship with Iris. Romy Fay (who also voiced the young central character in The Chosen Adventures) and Juliano Valdi also sound age-appropriate and keenly expressive, as Iris and Arco.
©Courtesy of Neon
Regardless, the bright eye-popping colors and lush, green natural backdrops suggest Bienvenu and his animators fruitfully absorbed considerable anime influences. (Perhaps the character design looks a little flat, but that also follows in the time-honored anime tradition.) Plus, there is a good deal of cool world-building, such as the retractable domes that protect homes and buildings due to the proliferation of wild fires (essentially the entire planet turns into California, five decades from now, but human ingenuity finds solutions).
Yet, Mikki’s design feels strangely reassuring, despite the lack of detailed facial features (maybe due to the vague resemblance to Marvel’s Iron Man, if you squint hard enough). Regardless, Mikki serves as a connective link between Arco and Bienvenu’s recently published graphic novel, System Preference, appearing as a major character in both.
Arco is a refreshingly sincere film that improves quite considerably over the course of its manageable 88-minute running time. (However, anime fans might justly complain Mamoru Hosoda’s snubbed Scarlet would have been a worthier nominee.) Still, Bienvenu’s film has heart and brains, working in concert to produce a powerful resolution that more than justifies its slow patches. Recommended for fans of animation and time travel, Arco releases this Friday (1/23) in theaters.
©Courtesy of Neon
Grade: B
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Here’s the trailer of the film.