Arco<\/em> is set in two futures. It begins centuries from the present, where humans no longer live on the ground but instead in tree-like structures in the clouds. Arco (voice of Juliano Valdi) lives a weirdly bucolic existence for a 10-year-old whose home is on a platform high in the sky. He gathers eggs, feeds chickens, and picks apples from a tree, but he does all of it in solitude. His parents (America Ferrera, Roeg Sutherland) and sister (Zoya Bogomolova) soon return from a mission to the past, and he\u2019s jealous of them for seeing dinosaurs. Time travel\u2014enabled by a multicolored unitard with a cape and a prismatic gem, obviously\u2014is a regular thing in this future, but you have to wait till you turn 12 to fly through the air and leave a trail of a rainbow behind you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet Arco is desperate to have his own dinosaur adventure, and he steals his sister\u2019s suit and tumbles into the past, but not nearly far enough. He lands in 2075, a low point in humanity\u2019s history, where he meets a girl named Iris (Romy Fay), whose parents (Portman, Ruffalo) are away working, leaving Iris and her infant brother in the care of a nanny bot (a melding of Portman and Ruffalo\u2019s voices). But Arco has lost his gem, and now he can\u2019t figure out how to get home and only Iris can help him. However, the two kids and their nanny bot, Mikki, don\u2019t only have to deal with Arco being stuck in 2075: there\u2019s also a wildfire approaching and a trio of time-travel obsessed weirdos (Ferrell, Andy Samberg, Flea) following them around too.<\/p>\n\n\n Arco<\/em> is less than 90 minutes, but it packs a lot of plot and ideas into that brief runtime. It\u2019s a bit overstuffed in ways that make it feel longer. Did Arco and Iris really have to simultaneously contend with a natural disaster, a missing gem, and a trio of oddballs in their efforts to get Arco back home? Yet there\u2019s also value in Arco<\/em>\u2019s refusal to oversimplify things for its young audience or to present a sunny view of the future for them. It isn\u2019t just the impending environmental crisis that makes 2075 a dark vision of what might be to come. Arco<\/em> takes a balanced view of the robots that are ubiquitous, but it is thoughtful about what their presence means in that year for humans\u2014and that they\u2019re absent from Arco\u2019s more distant future. In Iris\u2019s time, technology means that parents can be gone for days or weeks from their kids. It\u2019s not unusual for parents to be missing in action in children\u2019s films while the focus is on young characters, but the parents in Arco<\/em> aren\u2019t even in the same city \u2014 or the same century \u2014 as their kids, and their absence is keenly felt. There are also consequences for the children\u2019s choices that feel larger than what we\u2019d generally see in family movies in America. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That somber look at the future aligns Arco<\/em>\u2019s tone more with the films of Studio Ghibli than those of Disney, Dreamworks, and Illumination, and the visuals take a similar approach. Ugo Bienvenu serves as the creative force behind the film, earning credit as director, co-writer, producer, and graphic designer. With experience in illustration and comic books, Bienvenu brings a hand-drawn look to the animation. It\u2019s a 2D style, but scenes in nature feel particularly layered and textured, with a clear nod to the work of Hayao Miyazaki<\/a> (whose environmentalist themes are present here too). It\u2019s beautifully executed work, wildly imaginative and enjoyably weird across both its visuals and its story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though it\u2019s being distributed by Neon, Arco<\/em> features the Netflix logo in its opening credits. After its theatrical run, it\u2019s easy to imagine this being discovered on the streaming service by kids looking for something a little different than the standard fare. It\u2019s a bit messy, but that seems like a fair trade off for a film that wants to color outside the lines \u2014 and do it with a rainbow crayon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Arco” is out Friday in New York and Los Angeles. It opens nationwide on January 30. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/arco2.webp\")
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