By John Corrado
The Oscar-nominated French animated film Arco, which serves as the feature directorial debut of artist Ugo Bienvenu, imagines a future world where time travel is not only possible, but involves colourful jumpsuits that use rainbows and refracted light.
The film opens in the distant future, with a boy named Arco (voiced by Juliano Krue Valdi), whose parents (Roeg Sutherland and American Ferrera) are time travelling explorers, searching for ecological answers in the past. At ten-years-old, Arco is too young to legally be allowed to time travel (the minimum age is twelve), but he is growing restless, and longs to see the dinosaurs.
When Arco steals his older sister’s colourful jumpsuit, he accidentally travels back in time to the year 2075. It’s here that he meets Iris (Romy Fay), a girl being raised by her robot butler Mikki while her parents (Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman) work in the city. Arco and Iris team up to help him find the lost diamond that he needs to get back home.
As much as Arco serves as a colourful sci-fi adventure, it is also an environmental fable. In the year 2075, the houses all have retractable, see-through domes over them to protect from increasingly severe wildfires and other extreme weather events. In Arco’s more utopian future timeline, all of the houses are built on floating platforms that extend into the sky, since a great flood happened at some point.
If this sounds all doom and gloom, Arco also has a fantastical, spirited quality to it, and a good bit of comic relief. The kids are being pursued by a trio of colourfully dressed conspiracy theorist brothers named Dougie (Will Ferrell), Stewie (Andy Samberg) and Frankie (Flea), who travel around in a hippie van searching for proof of these visitors from the future, and first catch sight of Arco when he lands in the woods. This is the future by way of the psychedelic 1960s, with the three brothers feeling inspired by Yellow Submarine.
The visually appealing 2D animation has both French and Japanese influences, mixing old school comic book and retro-futuristic styles. Like the North American releases of Studio Ghibli films, Arco has also been faithfully dubbed into English with an all-star voice cast to help sell the movie to a wider audience. While I haven’t seen the original French language version, this voice cast (including Portman, who also serves as a producer on the film) does a good job of bringing it to life.
The imaginative and even trippier elements are nicely blended into a more grounded coming-of-age story. It builds to a bittersweet finale that is as much concerned with the mechanics of time travel as it is childhood friendship. At a well-paced 89 minutes, Arco is an enjoyable film that should please animation enthusiasts of all ages.
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