The most impressive part of the French animated sci-fi epic “Arc,” which took first prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, is its imaginative world-building. In fact, first-time director Ugo Bienvenu conjures up not one but two apocalyptic climate futures for his 2D time-travel odyssey, produced by actress Natalie Portman and distributed by Neon in an English version. (The voice cast also features the star power of Portman, Will Ferrell, America Ferrera, Flea, Mark Ruffalo and Andy Samberg.)
The first future we encounter in the film, where the titular young man Arco (Juliano Valdi) comes from, takes place around the year 3000. Humanity, who have acquired the ability to travel through time, live among the clouds, collecting extinct flora from the past to populate lush green gardens on elevated platforms while the Earth undergoes a healing process below.
When Arco steals her older sister's magical rainbow cloak to go back in time and see dinosaurs, she makes a mistake and crash-lands in 2075. Here she encounters the environmentally devastated world of young Iris (Romy Fay), where suburbs are protected from extreme natural disasters by bubble shields, and where robots, hoverboards, and holograms are her mainstays. Rainbow and Iris become fast friends and embark on an adventure to help Rainbow return home.
For Bienvenu, best known for his graphic novels, short films and music videos, the goal was to present a future full of hope. “A lot of people have asked me to adapt one of my comics,” he said in October at the Animation Is Hollywood Film Festival. “But I'm tired of adaptations. I wanted to show my children a movie that imprints itself strongly on the unconscious. And science fiction describes a world that is coming to an end most of the time. And I thought: if we now live in a bad science fiction movie, let's create science fiction that creates a better world.”
Bienvenu, who worked primarily at his Remembers studio in Paris, infused the animation with a global visual style that comes from living in Paris, Los Angeles, Mexico, Guatemala, Chad and China. The bright colors and language of shapes defined each world in a complementary way, revealing the influences of Hayao Miyazaki's “Princess Mononoke” and the anime series “Dragon Ball Z.”
However, his first two drawings provided the framework: the rainbow boy Arch and the raised platform with gardens and clouds. Together they symbolized a simpler, more imaginative world. “I don't want to lie to the kids,” Bienvenu continued. “I think fiction is made to prepare us for what we're going to go through in our lives. It's made to train our emotional muscle and it had an impact on the way we imagine these two.” [futures].”
Iris's nightmare world was conceived as the present by the director: identifiable but technologically advanced. “We are already working on it,” Bienvenu explained. “I embodied AI in Mikki [voiced by Portman and Ruffalo]the nanny robot It is not a crude form of AI. He has intelligence, he is programmed to improve Iris's life, to give her what she needs: company, protection, a playmate. And, to me, holograms are like Zoom today. And they live in these little bubbles that protect them. But they're just band-aids. “We are not addressing the real problem and that is that people are not interacting.”
Although Bienvenu hates AI, Mikki is his favorite character. “The problem for the audience is to leave the movie with their own questions about the world and whether they want to live in this kind of world or another,” he said. “So Mikki, who to me is AI, is great because she can raise children well.”
There's a touching moment where Mikki frantically draws her memories of Iris and Arc on a cave wall for posterity. But it is more than an artistic expression. “What makes a human being is experience,” Bienvenu emphasized, “and I wanted to say that machines are in a world of experience.”
By contrast, Bienvenu conceived the world of Arco's elevated platform as a transcendent Eden. It was biblical and multicultural. “My goal was not to speak to a specific community,” he added. “I wanted to talk to everyone. So I thought of this garden in the sky. I needed a strong image like a logo, because if you define utopias too much, they stop being utopias. And, thinking like a child, I came up with a cross. It's simple and visually striking, it stays in your head and a child can easily draw it.”
Although time travel becomes the catalyst for introducing Rainbow, and the drawing of the raised platform eventually unites both worlds, Bienvenu doesn't actually like the genre. “I didn't want to make a movie about time travel because it involves a lot of paradoxes,” he offered. “It's too complicated. And if you try to solve it logically, it's just bullshit. It was just a concept, and I had to treat it like 'Peter Pan' coming from the world of imagination to Iris. Arco embodies imagination. Having ideas is living the imagination. And that's what I want to tell my children. What saves me in my life is having ideas.”
