“It felt like we were living in a bad science fiction movie at the time, and I wondered that if sci-fi is responsible for establishing the circumstances we’re going through, what if I could imagine the first glimpse of the best future that could happen?” director Ugo Bienvenu told Zavvi. “I couldn’t see how the world could get better back in 2020 and I wanted to rediscover that feeling of tenderness, so the initial stage of the project was creating something that felt like a big hug.
“One day, I drew a head appearing out of the sky, and it was the face that would become Arco. I don’t know why this drawing felt like the culmination of my ideas, but it suddenly gave me the skeleton of what the movie would become.
“My feeling has always been that in animation you can’t write a script and put it into frames, the frames have to give you the story, and the animated movies I’ve loved the most are the ones that have been created that way. Just look at Hayao Miyazaki for example; he doesn’t begin with a script, he draws, because he knows that the drawing is connected to the subconscious, which is also where the best writing comes from.”
The movie opens in 2932, where humans now live in the clouds, and families can travel through time with special capes that create rainbows – the only catch is that you must be 12 years old if you want to make such a journey. Jealous of his family and desperate to see dinosaurs, 10-year-old Arco steels a cape and flies out, but accidentally arrives in the less fantastical year of 2075.
There, he makes friends with Iris, who essentially lives alone with her baby brother and a household robot (voiced, in unison, by Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo) because her parents – also voiced by Portman and Ruffalo – are never home. It’s a mundane future even though robots make up almost the entirety of the workforce, from nannies to teachers, and natural disasters like wildfires are ten a penny.
I’m in the minority for thinking Arco’s distant future – where humans live on platforms in the sky because Earth is that uninhabitable – is just as bleak as the 2075 he falls into, and Bienvenu similarly feels that it presents an optimism for Earth’s long-term survival.
“To me, Arco’s world is going well again; they live and work closely with nature, and they’ve regained a confidence in the future, which is not the case with the era Iris lives in. The movies I liked the most when I was a kid were the ones that didn’t lie to me, that looked me in the eyes and told me the truth about the world my parents were too scared to.
“The world we live in is the world of Iris, where we’re just unable and unwilling to build something better. From the very beginning, I wanted to be realistic about this, whilst also making something that felt like a hug; the audience should feel like how they did when they were babies, and I’m the mother singing a gentle song to them before bedtime to stop them crying.
“I don’t think of the film as being a political statement because I hate overt political statements in films; the very act of creating is already political. Fiction should be about defining what makes us humans in this moment, to share our experiences and offer a safe space to train our emotions ready for the hard situations in life.
“Imagination is a muscle, and Arco is a film saying that imagination is what can save us in the face of AI and climate change, and not see these bad developments as punishments, but opportunity for the human community to come together and fight for something rather than against each other. It’s dumb to say it like this, but it’s a reminder life can be a crazy adventure, and that we have the capability to improve the world.”
One of the biggest controversies with Arco is that AI technicians are credited during the closing credits for assistance in creating the voice of robot Mikki. Bienvenu is eager to point out that no AI is used in the finished film, and that his experiments with the technology only increased his belief that it doesn’t pose an existential threat to filmmakers.
“It was a philosophical idea; I wanted to hire kids to voice the kids, and if AI is the real voice of a robot, it would be worth trying out. We trained an AI to mix both actors' voices to create the voice of Mikki, and it superimposed them perfectly – but there were no emotions at all, and we didn’t end up using it as it sounded awful.
“We had hired people to do this, so they are in the credits, but it was an experiment that didn’t work. We recorded the voice performances again and overlapped them by hand, stretching them and cutting it, and it was a pain in the ass, but we ended up feeling an emotional connection to it because you could now hear the human errors that arose from blending two performances into one.
“It gave me a lot of confidence for our jobs, because as an audience, we recognise those human errors; a quality of an artist shouldn't be measured against their best achievements, but the quality of the mistakes they’ve made. True beauty in art is in the imperfections, and the incapacities that even the best artists have – and that’s a human touch that AI can’t replicate, which gives me hope for the future of our craft.
“It’s the same reason I made this movie in 2D, I feel the medium is magical because of the chance for human errors with artists; the incapacities of machines in 3D animation aren’t as exiciting. I connect so much more to work when it has that human touch.”
Bienvenu helped found production company Remembers with co-writer and producer Félix de Givry in 2018, but had to rapidly grow the team once Arco began developing steam – an intense period that nearly bankrupted the company.
“I was a teacher at (Paris art school) Gobelins for five years, and I’ve been able to get to know my students so well since they were 18, so I hired most of them, and it was incredibly moving to have them working alongside us. But during those three years, we couldn’t convince anybody else to believe in the project and follow us, so we had to finance an animatic of the movie ourselves, and after six months, we were broke.
“We called our agent, who also happens to be Natalie Portman’s, as we knew she’d just launched her own production company MountainA. They came to the studio and cried watching the animatic and immediately asked what we needed from them – they understood the project and wanted to protect it.
“We finished it after six months, and by that point, I’d been working for three years and eight months on this project without getting paid, having invested all the money I had into it. I was tired, and I knew if we didn’t launch production right then, I wouldn’t finish it.
“We were still raising money for it as I was directing it, and we ended up finishing it in 14 months rather than the 18 we planned for because the blueprint of the animatic was so clear.”
Although a French production, Bienvenu’s animation style has brought comparisons to anime, and even his biggest influence: Miyazaki. He believes his artistry has been developed even further afield, growing up in Mexico, Guatemala and Chad before eventually settling in France, taking in ever more eclectic inspirations over the years.
“I’ve lived almost everywhere, and Japanese and American animation were my biggest influences at the very beginning, but my colour palette I think is drawn from what I saw growing up in Mexico and Chad. Then I was introduced to American adverts of the 1950s for Coca Cola and Marlboro, which really struck me, before Dragon Ball Z and Miyazaki came into my life.
“I read more books than I watch movies, so it’s a mix of various animation styles; there’s an element of Peter Pan in the movie, even a little bit of Jumanji, no influence is too small. But I’m still honoured if people will say Miyazaki over everything – to me, he’s the best director of them all, not just in animation.”
