Director – Ugo Bienvenu – 2025 – France – Cert. PG – 82m
French with subtitles (not in UK cinemas) *****
English dubbed version (in UK cinemas) ****1/2
A boy from the far future attempts time travel too young and gets stranded in an earlier time – animated SF feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 20th
Somewhere in the distant future, above the clouds where the birds fly, in semi-spherical houses constructed on supports rising through the clouds, live the likes of Arco (English voice: Juliano Krue Valdi; French voice: Oscar Tresanini) with his mother (voices: America Ferreira; Sophie Mas) and father (Roeg Sutherland; Oxmo Puccino), and his elder sister (unknown; Joséphine Mancini). His daily routine includes feeding the hens and the pigs, but not flying because he’s not yet 12 and, as his dad constantly reminds him, that’s the law.
The house is powered at least in part by small water wheels. It would appear to be self-sustaining. The family grow a lot of plants as part of their self-sufficient diet, and the daily flights of Arco’s father, mother and sister take them to other times to gather samples of new plant species to grow as nutrients. Other times include the age of the dinosaurs, and the grounded Arco is itching to go.
So early in the morning, while the other family members are still fast asleep in their weightless, mid-air poses, Arco sneaks out, putting on his rainbow coloured suit and flying off into the sky. It does not go well. Before he knows it, the cape is getting in his face and he is falling… falling… He regains control, but, by then, it is too late. He has landed in another time.
2075. Houses are protected from inclement weather by protective bubbles; people are outside in their gardens during a thunderstorm. Iris (Romy Fay; Margot Ringard Oldra), about the same age as Arco, is struggling to cope with the absence of her mum (Natalie Portman; Alma Jodorowsky) and dad (Mark Ruffalo; Swann Arlaud) for several days due to the pressures of their work. The family robot nanny Mikki (Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo; Ugo Bienvenu), who also cares for her baby brother Peter, just isn’t the same, although her parents are able to time to spend time with her via holographic projection, which includes her mum reading her bedtime stories. When Iris can’t sleep, Mikki joins her on the balcony outside her window.
She goes to school on her child’s vehicle with Clifford (Wyatt Danieluk; Nathanaël Perrot), her friend who lives nearby, passing through the wreckage of last night’s storm which gangs of robot workman are dealing with and repairing. She is drawing outside having asked permission to be excused class when she spots rainbow trails moving across the sky. Investigating, she finds Arco crash-landed in a nearby forest.
Three grown men Dougie (Will Ferrell; Vincent McCaigne), Stewie (Andy Samberg; Louis Garrel), and Frankie (Flea; William Lebghil) – clad in blue, yellow and red respectively – are on his trail. Iris sends them off in the wrong direction, but they find the gemstone that has fallen off the hood of Arco’s cape. Without which, it turns out, Arco cannot fly and time travel.
The pair talk about their two respective worlds, and Arco tells Iris about the sky houses of his future.
When Mikki meets Arco in Iris’ home, and asks for the boy’s name, “Arco Dorell” doesn’t come up in the robot’s database and causes him to crash, which automatically summons insurance bots to the house to repair him. However, the rebooted Mikki has lost all memory of the boy and his name. With her holographic parents accusing her of lying, and Mikki calling the police with, as he believes, the girl’s best interests in mind, Iris decides to take matters into her own hands and disappears with Arco, the three grown men hot on their trail.
Iris and Arco head for the school, filled with switched-off teacher bots. Their flight from the three men takes them through rooms with Cinerama-like projections of various places – Earth in the dinosaur era, the underwater world teeming with creatures…
It’s difficult to reveal more without spoilers; suffice to say that what follows includes Mikki pursuing the children to a nearby cave shelter in a park in the middle of a raging forest fire.
A great deal of thought has gone in to the way societies are organised in the worlds of both the far future and 2075 – not to mention the design of everything associated with those worlds – architecture, cars, robotics, and so on. The visuals themselves have a unique feel; you can sense that they have been arrive at by a good deal of drawing and visual research. The movie allows for the chance to compare the two future societies, with the one in the far future looking like it may have solved many of today’s most pressing crises, which still present a problem in 2075. It certainly manages this better than the tedious, talky, preachy Can I Get a Witness (Ann Marie Fleming, 2024).
The script is clever, playing around with, among other things, that old favourite SF concept: time travel. Indeed, the clever script touches suggest certain elements in the future to be a direct result of Arco’s misadventures: make sure you watch right to the lengthy, downwards and sideways panning shot at the end. And if you’re wondering who the three grown men in their coloured suits are, you might well assume them to be one thing, as I did, only to find that you’ve completely misjudged them.
This extraordinary movie should appeal to admirers of science fiction, animation and French cinema alike. The imaginative narrative is mercifully free of the attention-grabbing, constant action of much Hollywood cartoon fare, playing out instead like the stories in children’s books I remember from my childhood. The film is completely suitable for children without the story ever feeling compromised in any way; I’m bound to say, as an adult, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I don’t know how much France has a similar tradition, but it certainly remains one of the few countries in the world (along with Canada, the US and Japan) that currently has a prolific animation sector, which helps movies like this to get made.
Note: AFAIK, the version being released in UK cinemas is the US English dubbed one, which is decent enough. However, both versions have been shown to press – the French subtitled version quite possibly by accident – and I’m bound to say, I preferred the French version. This may have something to do with the piece being conceived in French and executed by a French production team, although to be fair, one of the four producers is Hollywood actress Natalie Portman, so perhaps my statement here should be taken with a pinch of salt. Either way, the movie is worth seeing in whichever version is available.
Arco is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 20th.
Trailer: