by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $11.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Oscar Tresanini, Alma Jodorowsky, Margot Ringard Oldra
Intro:
… incredible visuals but is held back by dishearteningly muddled animation and textual decisions.
After the little Euro-indie film that could Flow snatched the Best Animated Feature Oscar last year, another independent offering has landed a nomination at this year’s Academy Awards. In an interview with Flow’s Gintz Zilbalodis, Ugo Bienvenu was quite candid about Arco’s plucky beginnings, starting with just himself and co-director/co-writer Felix de Givry, to a five-man team to make an animatic to secure funding, to a 130-large team to complete the work. But while the end result of all that hard graft makes for decent fruit, it does come with caveats.
The animation is a mixed bag. The scenery and movements are beautiful, and the striking rainbow imagery that is part of this universe’s form of time travel, lives up to the idea that an image could be so captivating as to inspire an entire film around it (the central rainbow was one of the first sketches that Bienvenu produced for this). But it can be tricky to fully appreciate the grandeur of the film’s visions of the future through the Ben Drowned-ahhh facial expressions on every human character here. Against the cozy (if mildly distressing in its predictions for future humanity) visual aesthetics, the people are ever-so-slightly unnerving in a way that doesn’t benefit the story.
Then again, the story isn’t all that great either. Bienvenu’s creative process began with the visuals, with Félix de Givry writing the script around the images… which shows in the final product; how this film looks consistently out-paces how the film feels as a story. The main plot, concerning 30th-century boy Arco accidentally landing in the late 21st-century and meeting fellow disaffected kid Iris, feels like a grab-bag of Spielbergian and Ghiblish narrative tropes. On the former, its rote exploration of two fish-out-of-water (fish-out-of-time?) youths reads like one flying bike ride away from E.T., and while credit is due for its approach to a time travel story, in that it doesn’t just default to the modern-day, which gives its environmentalist musings extra flavour, the run-arounds and attempts to hide from parental/adult authority results in unnecessary déjà vu.
As for the Ghibli side of things, while the film delves into commentary on how humanity would react to natural disasters, it mainly aims for a similar Zen vibe with its lack of a direct antagonist outside of just these two fast friends doing their best to help each other. Early on, sibling Squirtle-Squad-sunglasses-sporting-mad-scientists Dougie, Stewie, and Frankie are introduced (voiced by a truly chaotic trio of performers in the English dub with Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea), and they’re presented as the kind of nosy spooks that, again, are always in stories like this about a child and their extra-normal new friend. But between the heavy Three Stooges-coding and bewildering third-act developments, they are incredibly ineffectual even as comic relief villains. And considering they’re the closest that this film gets to a tangible threat, it leaves the story feeling two-dimensional.
Arco paints incredible visuals but is held back by dishearteningly muddled animation and textual decisions. It features admirable statements about the way that humanity considers the natural world, as something to spectate rather than nurture and protect, and there’s something to be said about how endearing its core friendship is, despite the jarring ideas surrounding it, but considering how high it aims artistically, it’s all a bit disappointing.
But hey, when it comes to small-means indie animation, it could be much, much worse.
