Arco (2025)

PG and I was really wondering.  Like, I know that animation tends to be PG and it's not like Arco is by any means offensive.  But do you know what?  Do you know what?  It feels like it is aimed at adults.  There's a scene where the protagonist child gets a pretty intense head injury.  Sure, we're used to kids in peril in animation.  It's almost par for the course.  But I watched this scene and thought, "Are they gonna kill that kid?"  It also gets pretty bleak at times.  Not the happiest of endings.

DIRECTORS: Ugo Bienvenu and Gilles Cazaux

Oh man, guys.  Guys.  If I can knock out this blog quickly and keep that momentum going, I will have the biggest high in the world.  I would like to apologize to my wife for buying this movie, not because it's bad, but because the opening credits said, "Netflix France."  That really makes me think that this movie is going to show up on Netflix one day and I will own a digital copy of the film as well.  Let's hope that the movie doesn't show up on Netflix before the Academy Awards because then I feel like the purchase would have been worth it.  

I love me some time travel.  I mean, I really love me some time travel.  I would have watched this movie even if it wasn't up for the Academy Awards.  I may be already overhyping it because, while I did absolutely enjoy the crap out of this movie, I do have to admit that I'm probably going to forget about this movie given enough time.  The funny thing is that this movie doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel when it comes to telling a good time travel story.  But what it does do, it does well and also steals from ideas that not a lot of time travel narratives do.  I hate doing a spoiler warning.  But if I'm going to really nerd out on a time travel film, I think I need to take the cuffs off.  There was this episode of Quantum Leap that absolutely slapped.  (Quantum Leap fans, both new and old, that show was all over the board in terms of quality.  That being said, I probably loved every episode.)   Anyway, there was this episode where Sam and Al switched places.  Al was the leaper and Sam was the hologram.  The problem was that Sam didn't have a link to exit the imaging chamber and it seemed like that was going to be a real problem.  But do you know how they solved it?  They literally sent a letter to the folks at Project Quantum Leap and they manually opened the door for him.  River Song also kind of pullled this card on Doctor Who and I'm flummoxed that more time travel stories didn't try pulling this as a get out of jail free moment.  Heck, Back to the Future tried to do this and somehow forgot how time worked in that franchise.  

I love when time travel has an easy answer for a really complicated problem.  The central conceit of Arco is that the kid who has the most impressive technology on the planet has no idea how to properly use it.  He broke it getting to a different future (which for him is the past!  SQUEE!) and is stuck with no way to contact his parents.  But the solve of the story is remarkably cool because a robot that is losing his memory etches his memories into a cave wall, which the parents see from the future?  I love it.  I love it so much.  I know.  I'm telling you.  It's a trope that has happened in other time travel stories, but not often.  (The more I'm thinking about it, the fact that Back to the Future III did very little with the "I can just write a letter" bit is hilarious to me because that would have solved all of the problems in Back to the Future part I.  Although, Back to the Future really loathes the paradox.  He could have just asked Doc to remember the extra plutonium.  Ah, I'm off-topic.)

I had to immediately Wikipedia everything about Arco when I was done. The thing is that the movie felt aggressively French in the best way possible.  If I had to put money on it, I would have thought that Arco was an adaptation of a band dessinee.  I specifically thought of Moebius with the character models that I was looking at.  (Let's be completely fair to a movie that I really enjoyed.  French animated faces sometimes look weird.  Arco's faces look straight up bizarre at times, especially considering how pretty everything else looks in this movie.) I could only award myself partial credit because the writer / director of this movie took elements from a different book he was working on --specifically the robot --and put it in Arco.  Still, the band dessinee vibe of the whole thing is incredibly hard to translate here.  I have to point out that I've never really been an anime or manga fan, despite loving comic books.  But I have dipped my toe into French comic books and there is something culturally different about the way that the French tell a story in visual and words that America doesn't really do as well.  

I started the MPAA section by saying that the movie doesn't really feel like it is for kids.  I'm probably going to show this to my 14-year-old this because she can handle it.  But I can't believe how bleak this ending was.  I just want to say that, for Arco, the ending of the story is tragic.  He has to live the rest of his life knowing that he stole his parents' and his sister's youths.  Like, that's bleak.  The fact that they all walk up to him old as dirt and that's the happy ending?  The crazy part is, this is a time travel story that doesn't even try to acknowledge that maybe there's a little wiggle room for a paradox.  Nope.  Arco, you have to live with your family who is happy to see you, but will not be able to watch you grow up because you stole a time travel suit.  That's a lot.  The sadistic part of me loves that.  One of the thing that always bothered me about the Harry Potter stories is that Harry breaks one of the cardinal rules of magic without a hint of consequence for his action.  In Arco, the protagonist is a child who just wants to see some dinosaurs and basically burns down his parents' lives and that's the message of the story.

And, Geez Louise, the amount of emotional angst in this movie is palpable.  Like, I absolutely believe that these kids are obsessed with each other.  I hate to keep on tying in other time travel stories, but the notion of Arco being a version of "The Eleventh Hour" from Doctor Who is too much.  Normally, this would all be a criticism, claiming that Arco lacked originality.  I don't even care because these storytelling tropes are incredible.  Iris's obsession with Arco both as a romantic interest (which is a little weird, but also adorable) and as an escape from the reality that she is experiencing is great.  I want to throw the world of 2070 under the bus.  Arco views Iris's world as a failed experiment in many ways.  He comes from a world where nature is the factor that motivates humanity to be the best version of itself, so seeing cars and supermarkets with rationing is something that comes across as perverse to him.  Yet, he finds joy in that society to because the one thing that 2070 has that Arco's time doesn't have is a sense of companionship.  Yeah, Arco can talk to birds and that's fine.  But sharing a prepackaged sandwich with a girl that finds him fascinating and dresses him up in her clothing?  That's the stuff that makes Arco compelling.  He's paradoxically intrigued and mortified by the world around him.  Also, how bleak is our timeline that a world that is run entirely by robots and remote parenting seems like an upgrade from what we have?

The insane part of this movie is the baby.  I tried looking up the baby's name, but I refuse to use AI so our forests won't burn like they did in Arco.  That baby is just shuttled everywhere.  I was thinking, if Iris's robot has to be in two places at once, a scenario parents deal with regularly, can't they just temporarily get a substitute robot.  I was watching that baby just vibing in the middle of a forest fire and I was anxious.  Sure, the baby is a drawn fictional character.  But in a year where there are multiple movies about forest fires, I just got really nervous for that baby.

Can I tell you my favorite fun little twist?  I weirdly like that the conspiracy theorists (whom I would hate in real life) were both right and also completely adorable when we realized that they weren't trying to hurt the kids.  Like, the Fratellis in The Goonies have so conditioned us to fear trios that chase kids that we all read these guys as absolute psychopaths.  But when they're all taking on the robots?  It's great.  And also, Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea?  Yeah, good choice.  I seriously thought it was Will Ferrell, but refused to believe that it was him.  I don't know why.

I know the movie isnt going to stay with me.  That doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the heck out of this film. It's so good, guys.  It's not even my favorite of the Oscars.  But I'll tell you what? This is time travel done well.