The most impressive part of French animated sci-fi epic “Arco,” which took the top prize at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, is its imaginative world-building. In fact, first-time director Ugo Bienvenu conjures not one but two apocalyptic climate futures for his 2D time-travel odyssey, produced by actor Natalie Portman and distributed by Neon in an English-language version. (The voice cast also boasts the star power of Portman, Will Ferrell, America Ferrera, Flea, Mark Ruffalo and Andy Samberg.)
The first future we encounter in the film, where titular youngster Arco (Juliano Valdi) comes from, takes place around the year 3000. Humanity, which has gained the capability of time travel, lives among the clouds, collecting extinct flora from the past to populate lush, green gardens on elevated platforms while Earth undergoes a healing process below.
When Arco steals his older sister’s magical rainbow cloak to return in time to see dinosaurs, he messes up and instead lands back in 2075. Here he encounters the environmentally ravaged world of youngster Iris (Romy Fay), where suburbia is protected from extreme natural disasters by bubble shields, and robots, hover scooters and holograms are mainstays. Arco and Iris become fast friends and go on an adventure to get Arco back home.
For Bienvenu, best known for his graphic novels, shorts and music videos, the goal was to present a future filled with hope. “A lot of people have asked me to adapt one of my comics,” he said in October at the Animation Is Film Festival in Hollywood. “But I’m fed up with adaptations. I wanted to show my kids a movie that will print itself strongly in the unconscious. And science fiction depicts a world that is ending most of the time. And I thought: If we’re living in a bad science fiction movie now, let’s create science fiction that would create a better world.”
Bienvenu, who principally worked out of his Remembers studio in Paris, infused the animation with a global visual style that comes from living in Paris, L.A., Mexico, Guatemala, Chad and China. The vivid colors and shape language defined each world in complementary ways, revealing the influences of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” and the anime series “Dragon Ball Z.”
Yet his first two drawings provided the framework: the rainbow boy Arco and the elevated platform with gardens and clouds. Together they symbolized a simpler, more imaginative world. “I don’t want to lie to kids,” Bienvenu continued. “I think fiction is made to prepare us for what we’re going to go through in our lives. It’s made to train our emotional muscle, and it impacted the way we imagined these two [futures].”
The nightmarish world of Iris was conceived as the present by the director: relatable but technologically advanced. “We’re already in it,” Bienvenu explained. “I embodied AI in Mikki [voiced by Portman and Ruffalo], the nanny bot. He’s not a crude form of AI. He has intelligence, he’s programmed to make Iris’ life better, to give her what she needs: companionship, protection, a playmate. And, to me, holograms are just like Zooms today. And they are living in these little bubbles that protect them. But they are just Band-Aids. We aren’t treating the real problem and that’s people aren’t interacting.”
Although Bienvenu hates AI, Mikki is his favorite character. “The audience’s problem is to get out of the movie with their own questions about the world, and if they want to live in this type of world or another,” he said. “So Mikki, which is AI, for me, is great because he can raise kids well.”
There’s a stirring moment when Mikki frantically draws his memories of Iris and Arco on the wall of a cave for posterity. But it is more than an artistic expression. “What makes a human is experience,” Bienvenu emphasized, “and I wanted to say machines are in a world of experience.”
By contrast, Bienvenu conceived of Arco’s elevated platform world as a transcendent Eden. It was biblical and multicultural. “My goal was not to speak to a specific community,” he added. “I wanted to speak to everybody. So I thought about this garden in the sky. I needed a strong image like a logo, because if you define too much of utopias, they stop being utopias. And, thinking like a child, I came up with a cross. It’s simple and visually impacting, it sticks in your head and is easily drawable by a child.”
Although time travel becomes the catalyst for introducing Arco to Iris, and the elevated platform drawing eventually ties both worlds together, Bienvenu actually dislikes the genre. “I didn’t want to do a time-travel movie because it brings so much paradox,” he offered. “It’s too complicated. And if you try to solve it logically, it’s just crap. It was just a concept, and I had to treat it like ‘Peter Pan’ coming from the world of imagination to Iris. Arco embodied imagination. Having ideas is living imagination. And that is what I want to tell my kids. What saves me in my life is having ideas.”
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