Arco

Bluesky

A sweet story about friendship and hope, with simple but attractive animation, Arco is among the leading awards contenders for 2026, but whilst it centres itself on the potential for positive change, there’s an inherently conservative quality to it which risks undermining that promise. It’s the sort of sweet-natured fable that makes adults nostalgic for childhood, but both the near and far futures it presents are, to children themselves, already likely to seem out of date.

Arco is a ten-year-old boy who, like most, longs to do things which the law does not yet consider him ready for. His neat little suburban home, a drifting planetoid with a well kept garden and Sixties-style modern house, is lovingly tended by his mother when she’s not joining his father and teenage sister on educational trips to other time zones, leaving him alone and bored, curiously bereft of connection or distractions. One night, all out of patience, he steals his sister’s flight suit and attempts to jump into the past by himself. He wants to see dinosaurs but loses control, instead crash landing in the year 2075.

This is a difficult year for humanity. The world has suffered widespread ecological collapse, so Arco is lucky to arrive in a patch of woodland, providing him with at least a little bit of cover. We can perhaps see the origins of his own way of life in the sectioned-off domes where middle class people live. There, two children, Iris and her baby brother, who is barely a character, are tended by their robot guardian, Mikki, their parents living a mysterious life somewhere far away. When Arco and iris come together like two pieces of a Spanish rainbow (rainbows being a major motif here), a firm friendship is established. Delighted to have an exciting new friend, she helps him search for the lost McGuffin that will enable him to phone home – but of course, when the moment eventually comes, neither of them really wants to part.

Complicating the children’s search is the presence of three nerdy adults – brothers distinguishable only by the colours they wear – who believe they once had an encounter with an alien and long to be able to prove that they’re no crazy. Though they’re clearly intended as comedy characters, there’s something innately creepy about them which unbalances the first half of the film, and they’re intensely annoying to spend time with. There are no real villains in the film, the threat which drives the action towards the end coming instead from a forest fire. There is, of course, the danger of being in trouble, and Iris needs to be smart to work around Mikki’s instructions.

The 2D animation recalls French work from the Seventies, just on the edge of the psychedelic, playing with the same colour palette but keeping it simple for young viewers. It’s engaging but not challenging, reflecting the film’s old fashioned values and familiar tropes. The characters are likeable enough, but there’s little sense of depth, and young viewers are likely to want more.

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