‘Arco’ review: Natalie Portman produces appealing French time-travel animation

Dir: Ugo Bienvenu. France. 2025. 82mins

A boy in a rainbow suit falls from the sky, leaving behind him a looping ribbon of colour. He crash-lands in the year 2075, where he is rescued by a kind 10-year-old girl named Iris (Margot Ringard Oldra). He is Arco (Oscar Tresanini), a child from a far-distant future in which time travel is possible and humanity has learned to live in harmony with the planet. Ugo Bienvenu’s appealing but not groundbreaking 2D computer animation takes very familiar themes – the accidental visitor from a distant realm is hardly untapped territory – but employs them in the service of something relatively rare: a science-fiction film that dares to hope for a better future.

A clear influence of Japanese anime 

Arco, the first feature from Bienvenu, premiered in Cannes before screening in the main competition at Annecy. It is a return to the animation festival for the filmmaker, whose short Maman played in competition in 2013. Arco lists Natalie Portman as one of its producers and she will also be among the English-language voice cast; her name should help make this a marketable prospect that could find audiences at further festivals. It has already sold to several territories, including Neon in the US, and should register on the radars of family audiences and animation fans alike.

Arco is the result of a creative partnership between Bienvenu and producer, co-writer and artistic supervisor Félix de Givry, which started when the pair met on the set of Mia Hansen-Love’s 2014 Eden (de Givry was an actor, Bienvenu was a hand double for one of the characters). With its clean, simple character designs and lush, detailed backdrops, there is a clear influence of Japanese anime – Miyazaki, certainly, but, perhaps even more, the high-concept fantasies of Your Name director Makoto Shinkai. But the film also has a close thematic kinship with E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, the classic story of a bond between a child and a visitor from the skies. 

Arco is first seen in his idyllic, self-sufficient futuristic techno-agrarian home. The family house is a dome set on one of many elevated platforms above the earth’s surface. Arco, the youngest in the family, tends to the livestock and crops while he waits for his rainbow-suited parents and older sister to return from their time travels. Soon enough they arrive, leaving rainbow vapour trails in their wake and bearing a plant sample from the distant past. Arco is desperate to join their next trip but his father refuses, pointing out that time travel is forbidden for the under-12s. But that night, Arco steals his sister’s cloak and refracting forehead gem (the science of time travel is all a bit too New Age to be fully convincing) and sets out on his own journey. What could possibly go wrong?

The era in which Arco finds himself is a near future for us, in which our current threats (raging wildfires, climate extremes, dependence on technology) have been magnified yet further. Domes protect communities from the destruction that wrecks the world outside, and families are connected holographically: Iris’s parents have outsourced the care of their children to a very competent robot named Mikki in order to give more time to their all-consuming jobs.

Threats to Arco’s safety come from the authorities, with the police on his tail and the digital surveillance systems of robot teachers flagging him up as an alien imposter. But there is also a trio of oddball brothers in primary-coloured suits and rainbow glasses (comic-relief klaxon) who seem to have an unhealthy interest in the boy and his secrets, but may not be the creepy predators that they seem initially.

The third act action is propulsive and stylishly executed, and the film’s conclusion has a bittersweet poignancy. And while Arco’s journey is not an unexpected one, the film’s optimistic endpoint brings a welcome note of hope.