ARCO: 3 ½ STARS. “shuns spectacle, in favor of ideas and introspection.”
SYNOPSIS: In the Oscar nominated animated film “Arco,” now playing in theatres, a ten-year-old from a utopian society time travels to the dystopian world of the year 2075. “Arco, why have you come to our time? This period, it’s the worst of humanity.”
CAST: Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo, Will Ferrell, America Ferrera, Andy Samberg, Flea. Written and directed by Ugo Bienvenu. Produced by Natalie Portman.
REVIEW: A family-friendly sci fi story, the animated “Arco” is an adventure film that shuns spectacle, in favor of ideas and introspection.
The action begins in 2932 with ten-year-old Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi) living a nice life in a picturesque tree city with his family. Like all preteens, he’s curious about everything, including why his family time travels on the weekends. Turns out, they go back in time to harvest extinct plants and bring them back to their world. He wants to go too, in hopes of seeing a dinosaur, but is too young.
Taking matters into his own hands, he steals his sister’s time travel suit and careens fifty years into the past. Instead of dinosaurs he finds a dystopian world, ravaged by storms, fires and other ecological disasters, where robots raise families for absent parents who only appear to tuck the kids via hologram.
There he meets Iris (Romy fay), a young girl who wants change her damaged world.
Together, with the help of Iris’s robot caretaker Mikki (Mark Ruffalo), they try and find a path home for Arco and a path forward away for Iris’s doomed world.
A story of connection and hope, “Arco” is a colorful, whimsical adventure that balances the melancholy of a world falling apart with some humor—mostly courtesy of three conspiracy theorists, Dougie, Stewie, and Frankie, voiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg and Flea—and the hopeful, sweet relationship between Arco and Iris. If Steven Spielberg dabbled in animation after watching a bunch of Studio Ghibli films, this is possibly the kind of tone he’d hit.
The English version (dubbed from the original French) is a little slow in its midsection, but lively voice work and beautiful, organic looking 2D animation pick up the slack.
As it winds toward an optimistic conclusion “Arco” regains its momentum, finishing off the climate change tale on a hopeful, humanistic note. It’s a coming-of-age story, not just for Arco and Iris, but for the idealistic notion that the future lies in the hands of today’s youth.
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