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This animated feature has lots going for it: expressive character design, a delicately melancholy musical score, and plenty of strong emotional beats, but the script is a touch too derivative for its own good. Not that little kids are likely to notice or care much about low-level plot-point larceny, and the youngest will be positively bewitched by the super-saturated palette that swirls rainbows all over everything. It’s like the animation equivalent of that classroom art-lesson trick where you hold a bunch of crayons at once to draw the seven rainbow colours of refracted light; the intensity gets to be a bit much after a while.
Literally riding the rainbow here is title character Arco (voiced by Juliano Krue), a 10-year-old boy from far in the future, who longs to go travelling back in time like his big sister and parents. The older family members have to don a special rainbow-coloured cloak, powered by a sparkly diamond thingy in order to visit, say, the dinosaurs. They do this to gather resources because in the future the Earth is a drowned planet and people live on man-made platforms that are stacked up to the sky. Arco is legally too young to time travel, but he steals his sister’s kit to go rainbow-slaloming in the relatively primitive era of 2075, when most of the film takes place.
After crash-landing in a forest, Arco gets scooped up by Iris (Romy Fay), a 10-year-old girl who has her own gripes about her family, especially the fact that her parents (Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman) are never home and Iris and her infant brother Peter are effectively being raised by nanny-robot Mikki (whose voice, in a thoughtful touch, is a blend of Ruffalo and Portman’s speaking the same lines simultaneously). Apart from the robot staff everywhere (they also serve as police officers, teachers and whatever else is needed), Earth looks mostly like the world we know in 2026, except that extreme storms and raging wildfires are more regular occurrences.
The parallels with movies such as ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Interstellar, AI and La Jetée are pretty obvious, while the general design, with its simplified characters and richly detailed backgrounds, clearly recalls Japanese anime. Still, director Ugo Bienvenu, who has made scads of shorts and music videos but makes his feature debut here, finds a way to make this feel mostly fresh. Aside from the chaste love between Iris and Arco, the most emotionally persuasive bits revolve around the deep bond between AI-powered Mikki and the kids, in a storyline that reaches an intensely sad conclusion. For a film about the inevitable eradication of most life on Earth, Arco isn’t as depressing as you might expect, as it finds a tiny thread of optimism to hold on to.
