The broken world we’re leaving behind for the next generation is a notion that is haunting plenty of films of late, but what’s a little rarer is making an apocalypse film that’s actually *for* kids. Last year we had the wordless wonder Flow, a Latvian Noah’s Ark tale without a human in sight, and now we have Arco from French animators Ugo Bienvenu and Gilles Cazaux, a colourful coming-of-age adventure that hides not one but two calamitous apocalypses in plain sight. It’s a bold approach that ends up being executed a little too subtly, a melancholic backdrop forced to elevate a central story that isn’t quite urgent or exciting enough.
Written in French by Bienvenu and Felix de Givry but playing with an English dub in most UK cinemas (look out for some pretty imperfect lip-syncing on this front), Arco introduces us to two futures. First, we’re all the way into the 30th Century, a time in which enormous sea level rises have forced humans to live in small enclaves of houses above the clouds. Visible tech and gadgetry here is minimalist, with the notable exception of the rainbow-coloured time-travel suits, activated by leaping into the air off the edge of one of the sky houses and able to take the wearer anywhere.
You’re not allowed one before you turn 12, but 10-year-old Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi) can’t wait, staying up one night to steal his older sister’s suit and hurl himself into the past. Aiming to see the dinosaurs, his inexperience gets him lost in time immediately as he crashes into the year 2075, which looks a lot more like a typical movie future – holographic classrooms, humanoid helper bots everywhere, and climate catastrophes buffeting every corner of the world. Here, Arco meets fellow 10-year-old dreamer Iris (Romy Fay) but loses a key part of the suit in the crash, so the pair must search for it for Arco’s trip home, all while regaling one another with stories of one another’s present.
There’s an underbaked quasi-conspiracy subplot going on here with three adult brothers trying to capture the kids, but the adventure stuff is typically where Arco is at its weakest, the peril never feeling that, well, perilous even as wildfires rage and vans careen into woodlands hunting for children. With its French origins, Arco is much slower and more sedate than any American animation of its ilk would be allowed to be, and while that does have its upsides, it keeps actual tension to a minimum.
Those upsides, though, are hardly negligible. For one, the slow pace gives Bienvenu et al plenty of room to build their worlds out, even with the sub-90-minute runtime. Both 2075 and the 30th Century are imaginatively drawn (the animation is very pretty throughout) and packed with intriguing touches. The primary colours and rounded shapes of the design philosophy of 2075 make the whole world look like a giant version of a kid’s playset, while the 30th Century folk sleep in womb-like anti-gravity tubes instead of beds. There’s also the very nice touch that Iris’s 2075 helper/nanny bot Mikki is played by Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman (who provide the voices for Iris’s dismal, absent parents) at the same time, a quiet but pointed jab at the outsourcing of childrearing to machines that so infects our present day.
Where this unhurried pacing really shines, though – in fact, where Arco itself is at its absolute best – is in the relationship between Arco and Iris, which quickly develops into a first love that is genuinely moving. It’s territory a lot of films are uncomfortable with, kids at the pivot point between pure childhood and the madness of adolescence, feeling *feelings* for the first time, but Arco treats its little heroes with kindness and patience as they, via the emotions they spark in one another, enter a new, unmapped phase of their life.
It’s this central engine that actually defines Arco, and so it is certainly better suited to slightly older kids than anyone under, say, eight. It might be a little too slow and placid at points, but it does something that very few films for youngsters do in its exploration of these alien feelings, the first emotions you might not want to share with your parents. Arco lets them know that that’s normal, and they’re not alone in it, and there’s a very, very real value in that.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 