Dir: Ugo Bienvenu/ Gilles Cazaux, France/United States/UK, 2025,, 89 mins, French with subtitles/English language version.

Cast: Oscar Tresanini, Margot Ringard Oldra, Ugo Bienvenu

Review by Carol Allen

I never cease to be amazed at and charmed by the beauty and creativity, which go into so many contemporary animated films.

Arco is yet another example. It combines the imagination of a sci-fi story with the charm of a fairy tale. Did you know that every time you see a rainbow, it’s actually the cloak of a time traveller from the future visiting the past of their planet? Well, you do now, don’t you?

The story opens on a very far off future Earth, totally flooded from an ecological disaster, whose inhabitants live in homes on stilts above the water. These are our rainbow time travellers, in the person of Arco’s parents and elder sister. They’ve just come back from visiting the age of the dinosaurs but Arco (Oscar Tresanini) is too young to time travel. You have to be at least twelve. Arco however doesn’t want to wait that long, so one night he “borrows” his sister’s rainbow cloak and the diamond, which is its home finding device and rainbows off to the past.

Meanwhile we meet Iris (Margot Ringard Oldra), a 10-year-old girl in a future much nearer to our own, where relationships are largely virtual and all services – fire brigade, police etc – are provided by robots. Iris and her baby brother Peter are looked after by a robot nanny called Mikki (voiced by the film’s director, Ugo Bienvenu), who is a most endearing and caring character, while their parents are always away working and just occasionally visit their children in hologram form.

The past Arco is visiting is of course Iris’s world and when his rainbow lands him in the woods near her home, it is Iris who finds him and looks after him. Because Arco has a serious problem. Along the way he has lost the diamond, which is his homing device and without it he’s trapped. Turns out It’s been found by three dodgy looking characters with their own agenda and Mikki and Arco have to track them down, get the diamond back and get Arco back to his own time.

It’s not the most original story I admit but I was much taken with its charm, innocence, beauty and the sweet and caring character of Mikki in particular.

The version I saw and the cast I have credited are the French language one. One of the producers of the film is Natalie Portman and there is also an English language version in which she and Mark Ruffalo play Iris’s parents and combine their voices to play Mikki.