Winning the Cristal for best feature film at the 2025 Annecy International Animation Festival, Ugo Bienvenu’s debut Arco arrives at this year’s French Film Festival like a burst of colour, a film as bright and shifting as a rainbow after rain.

Produced by Félix de Givry, Sophie Mas, Natalie Portman and Bienvenu, Arco follows its ten year old titular protagonist in the year 2932, an era where human beings wear rainbow caps that let them fly through the air and slip through time itself. Arco longs to travel to the past to see dinosaurs, but his parents refuse to hear him, brushing aside his desire before he can even finish his sentence. Hurt and determined, he decides to use the rainbow without telling anyone and accidentally travels not to the prehistoric past but to the year 2075. There he meets Iris, a girl who takes care of her baby brother Peter with the help of Nanny Robot Mikki, while her own parents are forever away for work.

As Arco tries to find his way back to the future, the journey widens to include Iris, Peter, Mikki, Iris’s friend Clifford and three peculiar men with rainbow tinted sunglasses named Dougie, Stewie and Frankie. Their little group blossoms into a travelling constellation shaped by accident and longing.

Continuing: https://theweereview.com/review/arco/