Arco Review – Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo Lead Environmental Animation in Rainbow Colors | film

THis animated feature has a lot going for it: expressive character design, delicately melancholy music, and plenty of strong emotional beats, but the script is a touch too derivative for its own good. Younger children aren’t likely to notice or care much about the stealing of low-level plot points, and little ones will be positively charmed by the over-saturated palette of rainbows swirling throughout. It’s like the cartoon equivalent of the classroom art lesson trick where you hold a bunch of crayons at a time to draw the rainbow’s seven colors of refracted light; The intensity gets a little greater after a while.

Literally riding the rainbow here is the main character Arco (voiced by Giuliano Cro), a 10-year-old boy from far in the future, who longs to go back in time like his older sister and parents. Older family members have to wear a special rainbow-colored cape, backed by a sparkling diamond in order to visit the dinosaurs, for example. They do this to collect resources because in the future the Earth will become a sinking planet and people will live on man-made platforms stacked up to the sky. Arko is too young to legally travel through time, but he steals his sister’s kit to go on a rainbow slalom race in the relatively primitive era of 2075, when most of the film takes place.

After making an emergency landing in the woods, Arko pursues Iris (Romy Faye), a 10-year-old girl who has her own concerns about her family, particularly the fact that her parents (Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman) never came home, and Iris and her baby brother Peter are being raised by robotic nanny Mickey (whose voice is, in a thoughtful touch, a combination of Ruffalo and Portman speaking the same lines simultaneously). Aside from the ubiquitous crew of robots (they also serve as police officers, teachers, and whatever else is needed), Earth looks mostly like the world we know in 2026, except that severe storms and raging wildfires have become more regular.

The similarities to films such as ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Interstellar, AI and La Jetée are very clear, while the overall design, with its simplistic characters and richly detailed backgrounds, is clearly reminiscent of Japanese anime. However, director Ugo Bienvenu, who has made a slew of short films and music videos but makes his feature debut here, finds a way to make this feel mostly fresh. Aside from the chaste love between Iris and Arco, the most emotionally compelling parts revolve around the deep bond between AI-powered Mikki and the children, in a story that reaches a very sad ending. For a film about the inevitable annihilation of most life on Earth, Arco isn’t as depressing as you might expect, finding a small thread of optimism to cling to.