Arco Review: Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo Lead Rainbow-Hued Eco Animation
Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo join the English voice cast of Arco, an animated feature about a time-travelling boy from Earth's drowned future and a girl with a robot nanny. This film offers expressive character design, a delicately melancholy musical score, and strong emotional moments, but the script feels a bit too derivative for its own good. Young children, however, are unlikely to notice or care about the low-level plot-point similarities, and the youngest viewers will be enchanted by the super-saturated palette that swirls rainbows across every scene.
Visual Splendor and Plot Overview
The animation style is reminiscent of a classroom art lesson where you hold multiple crayons at once to draw the seven colors of refracted light, creating an intense and mesmerizing effect. Title character Arco, voiced by Juliano Krue, is a 10-year-old boy from a far future where Earth is a drowned planet, and people live on stacked man-made platforms. He longs to time travel like his family, using a rainbow-colored cloak powered by a sparkly diamond device to visit eras such as the dinosaur age.
Arco illegally steals his sister's kit to rainbow-slalom into 2075, where most of the film is set. After crash-landing in a forest, he meets Iris, voiced by Romy Fay, a 10-year-old girl with her own family issues. Her parents, voiced by Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman, are often absent, leaving Iris and her infant brother Peter to be raised by nanny-robot Mikki, whose voice thoughtfully blends Ruffalo and Portman's lines simultaneously.
Themes and Influences
The world of 2075 features robot staff serving as police officers, teachers, and other roles, with Earth appearing similar to today except for more frequent extreme storms and wildfires. The film draws clear parallels to movies like ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Interstellar, AI, and La Jetée, while its design, with simplified characters and richly detailed backgrounds, recalls Japanese anime.
Director Ugo Bienvenu, making his feature debut after numerous shorts and music videos, manages to keep the story feeling mostly fresh. Beyond the chaste love between Iris and Arco, the most emotionally compelling aspects revolve around the deep bond between AI-powered Mikki and the children, leading to an intensely sad conclusion. Despite its theme of inevitable life eradication on Earth, Arco finds a tiny thread of optimism, avoiding excessive depression.
Arco is set to release in UK and Irish cinemas from 20 March, offering a visually stunning and heartfelt experience for audiences of all ages.
