If you can’t recall five animated movies of 2025, I don’t blame you. Regarding the amount of great movies that we had, it feels like it’s been a blind spot for animation. I harbor no ill will towards KPop Demon Hunters (“Golden” is that certified banger) or Zootopia 2 (highest American animated movie of all time!?), and I personally have a soft spot for Dog Man, but I can’t remember feeling particularly moved this year.
Regardless, as the theory of horror vacui goes, I can feel the surmountable pressure of animated films wedging in the collective void. What sort of space is there for Arco, a Neon-distributed, Natalie-Portman produced French film? One could probably guess a guaranteed spot in recognition (and as reported last, it slides quite snugly into an Oscar nom). While I don’t necessarily hate it, I can’t support the idea that it breaks new frontiers in ideas or styles. It’s sort of a strange standard to place a movie — do all of them need to radically impact us? — and in some ways, the absence of such might be enough to watch on its own merit.
Ten-year-old Arco lives in the super-future, shaped from the eventful Great Fallows that flooded the Earth and pushed the planet’s inhabitants to live upward in canopy-level self-sufficient homes. His parents and older sister time-travel to help bring back vegetation to reintroduce into their timeline. Arco is not allowed to join since he doesn’t meet the legal age imposition, but he sneaks out and does it anyway! He finds himself stuck in a time period that seems relatively close to ours, though mailboxes are near obsolete (“They’re only meant for bad news”), and robots are trusted caretakers and educators.
Arco meets Iris, a girl who is similarly abandoned by her overworking parents and finds herself as the little girl for robot caretaker Mikko (blend-voiced by her parents, played by Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman) and being an older sister for baby Peter. While entranced by the new pre-flood environment, Arco relays to Iris the urgency in finding his travel diamond in order to return home. Iris’s reluctance to lose her new friend is apparent, and in the shady margins hide three conspiratorial men who somehow need Arco’s presence to conclude that time-travel is real and they are, in fact, not crazy adults stalking children.
Stripping the story to its base level, Arco satisfies the kind of primal joy between two children across extradimensional divides finding commonalities and differences in each other. Society’s perpetual evolution makes it always seem like the “future” is so far from us, yet we are already living in the future from someone else’s perspective. Iris’s time period has not been devastated by climate change, and Arco only reveals off-handed details about the world’s eventual flood. However, for the purpose of depicting innocence against doomed fate, it seems vital to Iris that Arco teaches her how to communicate with birds.
Sometimes, you can get the idea of which components the film wanted to boast, and for Arco, it seems like the power of friendship is of utmost importance. Neither I or the audience is immune to Arco‘s temporary joviality or pretty scenery. Still, the film is paced like live-action, with little visual fanfare other than the blast of Arco’s rainbow outfits. The action sequences seem like they’re too large for a slice-of-futuristic-life story, and yet the stakes seem so little.
It also lacks the outer narrative purpose of these children’s lives to invoke any feeling of care beyond Arco getting back home. Until you get to the last fifteen minutes (which is frankly a bit heartbreaking), I can’t imagine that either adults or kids will have any emotional souvenir once the film stops airing. Even the role of Mikko, who seems to be a beneficial-only representation of AI, doesn’t feel like it earns its stripes for the beating heart-in-metal in the way that, say, Baymax from Big Hero 6 does. But like the refraction of light, the angle might be right enough for people to get a rainbow they were looking for.
Arco
2025
dir. Ugo Bienvedu
88 min.
Opens Friday, 1/30 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and AMC Boston Common and Assembly Row
