Somewhere over the rainbow

Living the dream - Arco director Ugo Bienvenu and producer Natalie Portman present the film at the Cannes Film Festival last year Photo: Richard Mowe

With this mop of dark tousled hair and an infectious enthusiasm for his craft French animator Ugo Bienvenu looks and sounds a lot younger than his 38 years.

He’s been riding the crest of an awards wave with myriad nominations including the Césars and Oscars. His film Arco was co-produced by Natalie Portman and, when we talk he is about to head off that evening to the Lumière Awards (the equivalent of the Golden Globes and awarded by the foreign press working in France). Arco was named best animated feature – and he had just come hot foot from Berlin where it had secured a similar prize from the European Film Academy. All of that on top of a Prix Special from the Fondation Gan and a Cristal accolade at Annecy Film Festival following its high profile bow in Cannes earlier in the year.

Ugo Bienvenu: 'I’m happy that the world can still recognise a film that is honest and made with love' Photo: UniFrance

Bienvenu, determinedly following his dream, confesses it’s all been a whirlwind. Professionally he’s delighted the film has resonated with critics, professionals and audiences alike. Personally, though, it’s been “a bit of a nightmare. I am happy for my craft but as a father I don’t see my two young children. My wife reassures me that they’re all OK and, in any case, I wrote the film with them in mind. I wanted to create something light and tender and that if one day they felt bad about life they could watch it and have hope again.”

The titular hero is a boy from a distant future in which humans live in harmony with nature on platforms perched in the clouds so that the Earth can renew itself.

Dressed in a rainbow cape stolen from his family, Arco (which means rainbow in Spanish) wants to go back in time to see the dinosaurs. But he loses control of his journey and lands in 2075.

In this not-so-distant future, he meets Iris, a girl about his age who is forced to contend with endless natural disasters and parents who interact with her via hologram, often delegating her care to a robot babysitter.

Despite an immense fire on the horizon, Iris wants to do everything possible to help Arco get home. This heartfelt impulse will also teach her how to save humanity.

Bienvenu (the surname in French means “welcome”) comes from a suitably cosmopolitan background. His mother Annick worked as a graphic designer on various magazines in the Eighties and Nineties. His father Gilles was a diplomat, which resulted in a peripatetic upbringing in such places as Guatemala, Chad, and Mexico before he returned as a teenager to complete his school studies in Paris. Growing up he was heavily influenced by such animations as the Japanese fantasy Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki. Initially he started work as a cartoonist and illustrator, publishing several graphic novels and as well as picking up gigs as an illustrator for various magazines and such brands as Hermès and Thierry Mugler.

Arco. Ugo Bienvenu: 'Producers didn’t like it because there was no obvious villain'

He suggests reflectively that he believes the world of Iris is “our world. You know, I made things that are already in our reality a little bit bolder than what they are now. For example, robots are embodying AI today. And so, everything is already here. I just made them a little bit bigger than they are, so I can show where we are going to and ask the question, do we really want to go there?”

When he was editing the film, it was at the time of the devastating fires in Los Angeles. “It was so shocking, like, seeing the same images, you know? And that's weird because when you are a science-fiction writer right now, when you write things, they happen faster than the time it takes you to do them to achieve them. So, it's sometimes frightening.”

Portman’s thoughts on the state of the planet aligned with Bienvenu’s philosophy. She underlined that she wanted to support “meaningful projects” and “to make films that create a better world for children.” She voices Iris’s mother in the English language version.

Bienvenu storyboarded the whole film before he started on the writing process with his collaborator Thierry de Givry. Neither had had any experience of working previously on a feature film. Underpinning the script was his belief that “since the 1960s, science fiction films have showed us a future that’s scary and doomed, and in Arco, I want to show a world that’s healed.”

Hugo Bienvenu: 'I thought OK if it works across the generations then we’re home and dry'

He was able to observe how it all worked at first hand. When his grandmother watched the film with her great grandson the two of them ended up laughing and crying in equal measure. “I thought OK if it works across the generations then we’re home and dry. In France at any rate the audience was a real mix. Getting the budget together [it cost around 9.5million euros] was always going to be an issue, but our way around it was to create an animatic [a preliminary sequence of images and shots] so that people could understand what was going on. One of the criticisms we received initially was that producers didn’t like it because there was no obvious villain.

“Despite that we went ahead and put all our savings into it, and it was at the same time we met Natalie Portman. She was on board immediately and on that basis, we were able to go to the bank and take out ‘millions’ … We were financing the film while we were doing it, and the budget wasn’t cleared before we finished. Somehow it worked out … and I’m happy that the world can still recognise a film that is honest and made with love.”

Bienvenu describes himself as a natural pessimist who “always bets on the worst so that if it comes out alright it feels good. Imagination can fill in all the blanks in our lives and make our existence better.”

Arco is released through Picturehouse Entertainment in the UK and Ireland on 20 March. Other release dates:

Italy 12 March; Australia 12 March; Germany 9 April; Sweden 14 August; Brazil 26 February.

Richard Mowe talked to Ugo Bienvenu at the UniFrance Rendezvous with French Cinema in Paris in January.