Back in 2019, the French illustrator and animator Ugo Bienvenu was feeling that life had started to resemble a bad science-fiction movie. Technology didn’t seem to be making anybody happier.
“The more technology we have, the less we have time for us, the less room for our minds,” he said in a recent interview.
So he set out to make “a movie that feels like a hug,” he said, and reminds people that imagination is “our superpower” in the face of adversity.
The result was “Arco,” a whimsical and optimistic vision of the future that opens Thursday in U.S. theaters, and which is nominated for an Oscar for best animated feature.
It isn’t all sunshine and laughter: Following two children from different eras who come together through time travel, the film takes place between 2075, a time when robots carry out most jobs, and an even more distant future in which humans live on high-up platforms among the clouds.
“Arco” also addresses climate change, but rather than taking the apocalyptic route, it considers the possibility of a brighter tomorrow through innovation.
“Everything that we see all around us has been designed by humans, so let’s design things that suit us better,” he said during a video call while walking in New York City. “If we want better things to happen, we have to imagine them first,” he said.
There are interactive holograms and protective domes that keep homes safe during extreme weather events in “Arco,” but Bienvenu never spells out onscreen how these work. “Explaining things is so boring,” he said. His only explanation: It’s a fantasy.
That might be because he doesn’t much like typical sci-fi storytelling, he said, except for the work of Clifford D. Simak, whose fictions, like “Arco,” give nature in a prominent role. Instead of taking place in dystopian landscapes, spaceships or labs, “Arco” mostly unfolds in a town near a forest, which makes for gorgeously drawn backgrounds.
What guided Bienvenu mostly, he said, were the two children at the center of the film, Arco and Iris, whose decisions carry major consequences.
“When I was a kid, I felt like nobody respected the adult that was in me — and now that I’m an adult, I felt like nobody respected my inner child,” he said. “I wanted to do a movie that respects kids’ intelligence.”
Bienvenu’s own childhood — which he spent in Guatemala, Mexico, Chad and France because of his father’s work as a diplomat — contained the roots for his path in animation.
As a 7-year-old living in Chad, Bienvenu watched a Japanese anime TV show that became his artistic awakening. “I discovered ‘Dragon Ball Z,’ and it changed my life,” he said of the series created by the manga artist Akira Toriyama. Then a second breakthrough came at 14 in Mexico, when he watched “Princess Mononoke” and entered the realm of Studio Ghibli for the first time.
“It was like Akira Toriyama told me, ‘You’ll be a cartoonist,’ and then later Miyazaki told me, ‘You’ll be an animator,’” Bienvenu said.
He went on to attend Gobelins Paris, which is consistently ranked as the world’s top animation school, and also studied production. He now co-owns the production company Remembers with the actor Félix de Givry, who served as a producer and co-writer on “Arco.”
Projects like “Arco” are able to exist largely because France has several renowned animation schools and substantial government funding for the arts. And hand-drawn animation remains a popular technique in France.
“In the U.S., the approach is more studio oriented, and in Europe, especially in France, it’s about the director’s point of view,” said Mickaël Marin, the chief executive of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, a prestigious annual event whose top prize last year went to “Arco.”
Still, Bienvenu said it was challenging to get funding for “Arco,” because financiers didn’t understand the idea of a sci-fi adventure without an obvious villain. “The antagonist in the movie is the system we are living in,” he said.
Frustrated, Bienvenu and De Givry invested all of their capital in the creation of a rough animated storyboard to serve as proof of concept. Through his agent, Bienvenu got it in front of the actress Natalie Portman and the producer Sophie Mas, who were captivated by the project and decided to support it via their company, MountainA.
The actress’ involvement helped secure a star-studded voice cast for the English-language dub, including Mark Ruffalo and Will Ferrell, and Portman also voices two characters.
“It was such a poetic way to describe imagination,” Portman said of the movie via email. “It allows one to think of a world that doesn’t currently exist. It’s that memory of the future that unites artists and activists.”
The presence of such mature subjects in narratives aimed at young audiences may not be uniquely French, but there’s a subtlety and sophistication that is. That epitomizes the idea of “the French Touch,” a term that the historian Sébastien Denis has used to explain what distinguishes Gallic animation.
“The stories tend to be personal but socially engaged rather than generic and gag-based,” said Richard Neupert, the author of the book “French Animation History.”
For Bienvenu, the role of fiction is to prepare viewers for what they might experience in their own life. With “Arco” and the use time travel, he hopes to call attention to how limited our time on this planet is.
“I’m a father, and we often hear parents say, ‘It goes so fast.’ But kids, they never realize it goes so fast,” he said. “I wanted the ending to tell kids they have to enjoy the moments they have with their family, because it all goes fast.”
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