Director: Ugo Bienvenu
Writers: Ugo Bienvenu, Félix de Givry
Stars: Margot Ringard Oldra, Oscar Presanini, Nathanaël Perrot
Synopsis: What if rainbows were actually time travelers flying across the sky? On his first flight through time, Arco (10) crash lands from the year 3000 into our near future. His fall is witnessed by a little girl, Iris, who helps him return home.
Every day, whether thinking about art, life, or the world itself, we wonder about the future—hopeful for prosperity or fearful of damnation. Nowadays, pondering the future and what’s in store for us comes with a melancholy feeling rooted in the past, as everything seems to be getting worse by the minute, with climate change being ignored and raging politicians stripping the freedom from the people they govern. It is hard to keep your head up at times, given the daily barrage of bad news. However, a small amount of hope lingers while we ponder and question. In graphic artist-turned-filmmaker Ugo Bienvenu’s feature debut, Arco (screening in the Locarno Kids Screenings at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival), these worries and aspirations for a better world are represented through a colorful, imaginative time-travel adventure.
Ugo Bienvenu views the past and future through a double-sided lens that reveals hard truths and warm beauties, yet in a manner that is both accessible to children and thoughtful enough for adults. He utilizes many films as references and inspirations for his pictures, sometimes at the cost of the story’s cohesion and structure. But the animation is so mesmerizing, and his world both immersive and creative, that the viewer remains quite enamored with the story. Arco begins in a distant future, many centuries ahead of our current reality. We are introduced to the titular character (voiced by Oscar Presanini), a young boy who lives in the skies alongside his magical family. They cover the skies in lovely rainbows, creating prismatic scenery that immediately taps into Bienvenu’s imaginative mind, a sense of wonder and curiosity missing in most mainstream animation pictures.
The youngling’s family can time travel, with the help of a mystical robe and crystal ball that permit them to go to any place in time and history. Unfortunately, Arco cannot participate in those journeys because he is under the legal age to do so. Like any other child would behave when they can’t do something everyone can, Arco gets jealous of the trips their family takes while he’s stuck at home. Of course, he does not understand that this gift comes with numerous responsibilities and repercussions if done incorrectly. Arco just wants to get a sense of what it is like to escape from his world into a distant, alien place. He has heard countless stories from his sister, and Arco envisions what it would be like.
One day, his curiosity gets the best of him and he steals the robe and crystal ball to head on an adventure of his own. As expected, Arco gets lost somewhere on the brink of time. Arco crashes down in 2075, a time plagued by environmental disasters and technological advancements that have distanced its inhabitants, like the sentient robots built to take some of the responsibilities off the humans. Holograms are also a thing in this world, giving people the ability to be in two places at once. Of course, this affects many families, as they are removed from the tenderness of their loved ones in exchange for modern-age technology. One of those affected by this technology is Iris (Margot Ringard Oldra).
Iris is a ten-year-old girl who lives with her infant brother and the assistant robot, Mikki (Alma Jodorowsky and Swann Arlaud), whom her parents bought to help around the house while they are at work. She spots the crashing Arco and rushes toward him, intrigued by his rainbow trails. Both lost in their worlds and without a parent to guide them, Iris and Arco bond over their shared sadness and isolation, making it seem as if their souls were somehow intertwined. From there, the adventure continues as Iris searches for a way to bring Arco back home, traveling into the skies and to the distant future, eons away from her reality. Throughout the film, Bienvenu creates various imaginative worlds and their respective changes induced by climate change (forest fires, rising sea levels, melting ice caps).
These creations are a thing of beauty, yet plagued by tragic pasts and the suffering of previous generations. From these, Bienvenu explores the duality of hope and despair, placing Iris and Arco, both young individuals who are unfamiliar with life before them, on a journey of reflection. Arco is shaped by these ideas of climate change, which have been passed down through generations, as the Earth slowly deteriorates towards self-inflicted decay, and the parent-son dynamics interlaced within – the loss of communication, lack of tenderness, and feeling isolated in a place constantly changing. These two outsiders, Iris and Arco, go around the world and through time in search of what their own time lacks. However, what they learn is to appreciate what they do have and try to protect it while they still can. That part of the film is what struck me the most with Bienvenu’s storytelling.
By passing through different pasts and distant futures, Iris and Arco both notice that, somehow, each of these variations of the world is plagued by the same things. Its approach to exploring this is too sweet and safe for my liking; it takes some of the emotion out of the story. For example, the antagonists of the time-traveling younglings chase them wherever they go. But rather than being conduits for the themes explored, the “villains” are here as mere excuses to move Arco and Iris on their route to their destination without giving them much of a background. Their shenanigans might entertain children. But they take up too much time from the main characters. Arco could have benefited from either developing them further or focusing entirely on Arco and Iris’ cultural heritage and how it is affected by their relationship with their parents and technology — an idea that Bienvenu has explored previously in his literary works, particularly in ‘System Preference.’
Regardless of these weak characters and their motives, Arco is a bright spot in the year’s animation catalog, not solely because of its imaginative design, cementing Bienvenu as a voice to keep note of, but in how it processes its ideas for all audiences, while showing that urgent topics can be presented to younger audiences without oversimplification. The best kind of children’s entertainment is that which presents subjects to kids that parents may struggle to explain. There are also numerous excellent examples of animated films that comment on climate change or our relationship with technology, such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke. While Arco does not have that pristine storytelling and thematic exploration of the aforementioned Studio Ghibli pictures, what Bienvenu brings to the table is spontaneous and rich enough to celebrate.
