Europe’s participation in the animation game the last few years changed the genre forever. Movies like Flow or Mars Express couldn’t have come from Japan or the US in the wonderful way they arrived, meaning all bets are off. And hopefully, if Arco is any indication, we enter this wild period where the animators are free to get weird, and try random things to see if they work.
It’s the year 2932. Earth is uninhabitable, and people live in pods in the sky. Arco (Oscar Tresanini) is a young child living in one of those pods. He so badly wants to take his first flight in his rainbow suit, which his parents (Oxmo Puccino and Sophie Mas) use to time travel and teach kids about things like dinosaurs. On the DL, Arco steals a suit, and sneaks out to see those dinosaurs…except he misfires my thousands of years. Arco ends up in 2075, where he makes friends with Iris (Margot Ringard Oldra), a sad girl on a now habitable Earth, but raised only by her robot caretaker Mikki while her parents are off planet.
TWO future times? Why no animator thought to do this until now…is shocking! So props to writer/director Ugo Bienvenu, having a blast animating both worlds. His message is clear: both futures are futures in our history, showing one that’s gonna be dark and hard to navigate, and a distant other that, while alarming, shows maybe some optimism? 2075 is close enough to our current timeline that we recognize this Earth, just with more space and robot technology as the humans are transitioning to a new reality; poor Iris is washed out in dark greys and blues, mirroring her own melancholy. On the other end of the spectrum is Arco’s 2932, vivd from literally a rainbow of colors he gets to wear! So even while we’re dazzled at what we’re seeing, Bienvenu welcomes (hehe) us to think about the path we’re on…and what might be coming on the horizon besides a time traveling rainbow boy.
With the worldbuilding being the key priority, Arco’s story goes for the kitchen sink approach. There’s a lot of tendrils, and Bienvenu hopes more work than they don’t. That’s mostly true; Iris as a character works; the poor sad girl just wants a human friend, and is instantly easy to root for. Arco’s basically rendered then as the plot driver, whose only discernible character trait is that he’s lost. The stuff with the 3 daffy rainbow men is a no go from the get go, too silly and the most French part of the story that doesn’t translate. But in a story about the fate of humans, Mikki’s tale is the most profound. What happens there almost brought me to tears, as the robot babysitter has a real arc with more human stakes than many of the human characters in this movie.
A boy in a rainbow suit that time travels ends up making friends with a girl and her robot butler…is a really strange animated movie idea. I for one welcome the new ideas. Everything’s on the table. I want to get to a point where animation becomes a melting pot, where the best ideas combine to create something completely new…making a universal kid language for the whole world to enjoy!