Ugo Bienvenu’s Arco begins in a way that suggests that the filmmakers are assuring their younger target audience ahead of time that, yes, humanity does ultimately achieve something resembling a happy ending. It’ll be a place of cloud cities, and where time travel is an everyday reality. It’s just that it’ll take 900 years to get there, and from the vantage point of 2025, the film posits that things will get a hell of a lot worse before they get better.
That leaves children having to reach for a future in a present that neglects their needs. Arco specifically focuses on young Iris (Romy Fay), adrift in the year 2075, in a world where the suburbs are protected from wildfires by fireproof domes, new natural disasters demolish parts of the world on a daily basis, and the adults are so preoccupied with finding solutions that children are predominantly taught and raised by clunky Boston Dynamics-style robots.
Needless to say, Iris is very lonely. That is, until Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi), a child time traveler from the much happier 30th century, crashes into her life. The two strike up a fast friendship, fulfilling Iris’s desperate need for understanding and companionship she desperately needs, though it’s hamstrung the pressing need to return Arco back to his own time.
Arco is a children’s adventure set in world that’s literally on fire, which makes the moments of childlike wonder and connection all the more endearing and vital. There’s a hand-painted quality to the 2D animation, which sits in a vibrant sweet spot where Studio Ghibli and René Laloux meet. There are a few futuristic marvels on display, such as elementary school classrooms that take place in virtual realms, and Arco’s rainbow-based time-travel apparel is at the center of some dazzling imagery. But the stakes are more emotional than anything else, centered largely on children finding the solace that the world can’t seem to bring them.
The film’s tension lies almost entirely in the scope of Iris’s neglect, which is most sadly evident in her holographic communication with her parents (Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo). Evil androids or cyberpunk corpos aren’t the enemies here, though a comic-relief trio of bumbling nerds (Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea) initially hint at that. Arco’s big bad is the very possibility of there one day no longer being a world that can be explored, with or without a friend by your side. Bienvenu’s film reckons with the possibility of that grim fate, but through its eponymous character, it also attests with convincing earnestness to hope being a resource worth preserving in dark times, and that it will be enough to change the course of the world.
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