REVIEW: Arco [2025]

Rating: PG | Runtime: 88 minutes
Release Date: October 22nd, 2025 (France) / January 23rd, 2026 (USA)
Studio: Diaphana Distribution / Neon
Director(s): Ugo Bienvenu
Writer(s): Ugo Bienvenu & Félix de Givry

I wanted things to change.

It’s always fun to think about the butterfly effect of certain projects—like how Arco never would have happened without creators Ugo Bienvenu and Félix de Givry meeting as actors on set for Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden. Neither could have known the journey they’d ultimately take to imagining a world where rainbows are the vapor trails of time travelers surfing on a rainstorm’s refracted light, yet that’s exactly where they wound up after a five-year production process.

It’s a cute, inspiring, and often terrifying vision considering its 2075 setting depicting climate change’s worst effects. Young Iris (Romy Fay) longs for something different in her life—a dreamer ready to leave the hardships of constant apocalyptic tragedies forcing everyone to secure their homes with a domed shield and the loneliness of an existence where her parents are always away at work in the city. She’s often left fending for herself.

Enter Arco’s (Juliano Valdi) similarly disgruntled child, desperate to travel through time and space like his parents and sister to experience the wonders of the past. So, he steals a rainbow cloak and diamond crystal without the necessary training to do anything but crash land in an unknown era. Thankfully, however, it’s Iris who finds him, protects him, and believes his impossible story. Because getting him back home might just mean also escaping hers.

Bienvenu and de Givry glean bits from so many science fiction tales to create an exciting vision of the future. There are the holographic classrooms at Iris’ school putting the students into the Jurassic period or onto a pirate ship. There are the nanny robots like Mikki who raise kids while their parents are away for weeks at a time—a gentle and loving steward programmed to speak in an echo of both Mom’s (Natalie Portman) and Dad’s (Mark Ruffalo) voices simultaneously.

My favorite part, though, is that this futuristic 2075 is actually the film’s present with Arco’s time being even further down the line despite feeling like our own. It’s probably more like our past considering how volatile things are now. He gets to live with his family when they aren’t adventuring. They don’t have robots and thus remain responsible for their own chores. And, while they live in the clouds, their homes have gardens and fresh air with no threat of catastrophic weather.

A time travel plot like this also provides room for ambiguous crackpots (are they allies or foes?) who know something’s amiss but can’t prove it. The brothers serving this comic relief role being voiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea ensures the entertainment value stays high as their unavoidable buffoonery prevents us from fearing them as threats regardless of what gets revealed as their intent. Sometimes people just want to prove they aren’t crazy to themselves.

And while the main messaging is about love (Mikki’s trajectory is wonderfully fleshed out), patience, curiosity, and empathy for that which is unfamiliar (there’s a lot of ET in Arco as far as working to get this stranger back to his family), there’s also some intriguing cause and effect in how past and future interact. Some of it is in-film, but most of it comes via a wordless camera pan via epilogue that introduces some great chicken and egg dynamics.

The animation style is attractive, the environments intricately detailed, and the action energetic whether via car chase, survival run through fire, or escapes from an army of robot schoolteachers. I also really loved Arnaud Toulon’s score—always present yet never overpowering. It’s a crucial piece that augments the emotions carried by Fay and Valdi. The rest of the cast might prove a tad too star-studded, but those two kids deliver performances devoid of any false notes.

Arco had an Oscars-qualifying run on November 14th, 2025.