Arco Review: A Time-Travel Take On A Classic Story Is An Animated Wonder

I won’t lie to you and say that Ugo Bienvenu's Arco is unlike any film you've ever seen. From E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, to The Iron Giant, to How To Train Your Dragon, the basic plot of the new animated movie is one with which audiences are all familiar: a lonely child discovers a strange, borderline magical friend and seeks to protect and help them.

But here’s the thing: all three of those movies are from different decades and all are deeply beloved. A classic story can become new and potent over and over if it’s brought to life with a fresh and imaginative vision, and that’s what makes Arco (with pun totally intended) soar.

The movie has a familiar core, but it has a few surprises that turn expectations on their head, many of its big picture swings are fascinating, and it has the dexterity to be both laugh-out-loud funny and utterly devastating. It’s a beautiful work not just emotionally but also stylistically, the hand-drawn animation reminiscent of the best of Studio Ghibli and featuring some shots so stunning that you want the movie to pause so that you can examine every line in the gorgeous detail.

The screenplay by Ugo Bienvenu and Félix de Givry begins in the distant future of 2932 and introduces the titular Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi) as the child of time travelers who deem him too young for trips back to the ancient past. Determined to see dinosaurs, he ignores the orders of his parents (Roeg Sutherland, America Ferrera) and uses his sister’s rainbow cloak to fly into history, but because he doesn’t really know what he is doing, he crash lands in the year 2075.

He’s discovered by a young girl named Iris (Romy Fay), who has a father (Mark Ruffalo) and mother (Natalie Portman) who are always away on business and leave her and her baby brother in the care of an all-purpose robot named Mikki (a clever blend of Ruffalo and Portman’s voices). Iris becomes determined to help Arco get home, though they try and do so while evading a trio of bumbling nerds (Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, Flea) who are trying to prove that time travelers are real.

Arco has familiar coming-of-age DNA but a soul all its own.

Right off the bat, I love that the film doesn’t make the most easy move possible and send Arco back to present day, as it’s far cooler to see him go from the distant future to the not-so-distant future, allowing Bienvenu and the animators to explore two very different worlds that are very different than our own. It stops the movie from directly commenting on the state of the present, but it compensates with universal themes about family and friendship and still has something to say about the role of technology in parenting.

As we often find with the best versions of this kind of story, the tru magic in Arco is the relationship between the eponymous adolescent and his new friend, as there is a great depth that Bienvenu and de Givry mine with the characters (and the performances by Juliano Krue Valdi and Roma Fay are wonderful). Arco is a spunky and mysterious kid who tries to hide the shameful truth about how he ended up in the past, and Iris’ loneliness is utterly heartbreaking and so is the quickness with which she makes a bond with the future boy to fill a gaping void in her life.

The artistic beauty in Arco is staggering.

Paired with these special characters is a extraordinary style that makes Arco a cinematic treasure alone. The film lets you know that it’s going big from the very first sequence – as we are presented with a life on Earth that sees people living on giant tree-like structures with homes on large platforms, and time travelers leave rainbow trails as they fly through the air – and it never ceases to impress from that point forward. The adventure is full of remarkable sights and set pieces, including robot chases and wildfires, but even just a shot of a clearing in a forest will drop your jaw.

As far as legacy is concerned, Arco is looking down the barrel of being remembered as an “also ran” in the Best Animated Feature category at the 2026 Academy Awards, as much bigger and publicized titles are looking at much better odds to take the Oscar, but dismissing the movie for that reason would be extremely foolish. It doesn’t have the recognition of KPop Demon Hunters or Zootopia 2, but it‘s better than both.