Cel-paint with all the colors of the wind!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscars Quest ’26 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. Among other perks, sometimes it means movies I was thiiis close to watching last year get a second chance to slot into my free time.

Arco played at last year’s Heartland Film Festival and was on my viewing shortlist, but its lone showtime wound up among the several I missed due to schedule conflicts amid that great cinematic feast. One of two French nominees for Best Animated Feature this year, it played here in Indy for a single Oscar-season week before it flew off like a rainbow-streaking rocket toward the sunset.

The Gist: First-time writer/director Ugo Bienvenu takes us to a distant future where humankind lives far above the messes left below, in houses mounted on mile-high hurricane-resistant columns rising above the clouds. Time-travel suits are a thing, and they fly, and they leave rainbow trails everywhere they zoom around, and their future doesn’t have iridophobic culture-warriors who try to shoot them down. But to keep all that future-wonder in check, users must be at least twelve years old. Our li’l rascal Arco (voiced by Juliano Krue Valdi, who’ll be playing a certain young King of Pop in the upcoming Michael) is the youngest in a loving family of five, who grabs a suit and illegally sneaks away because he just really wants to see some super awesome dinosaurs live in person for his birthday, and watching Jurassic World 316 for the third time just isn’t the same, even with 64K holodeck visuals and Hyper-Deluxe Smell-O-Rama.

But the inexperienced lad fumbles the controls and only skips back to the tad-less-distant future of 2075, where he meets a girl about his age named Iris (Romy Fay). In her era, Facetime is now 3D holograms and robots have replaced all the schoolteachers and nannies. Her parents (Marvel superheroes Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo) entrust her in the care of one — whose voice is both actors’, cleverly intertwined — while they both stay in The City during the workweek, kinda like Don Draper minus the adultery. The two lonely youngsters meet-cute in a park, where Arco’s suit is damaged so he can’t return home. While they quest to replace the broken piece, they’re stalked by a trio of weirdos resembling a neurotic British Invasion band except for their matching scalene-rimmed rainbow sunglasses (Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea, a trio of typecasting). Wacky chases and colorful flights through pretty backdrops ensue.

The familiar voices: In addition to those named above, the English dub released to American theaters includes Barbie‘s America Ferrara as Arco’s mom. Fun trivia: his dad is voiced by Roeg Sutherland, one of Kiefer’s brothers, whose day-job is at top Hollywood talent agency CAA.

I’d hoped to catch a subbed showing with the original French voices rather than the dub, but I misunderstood the theater’s app listing, which said it would be “subtitled”. What they meant was captions for the hearing impaired. They’re the only theater in town that offers this (which I appreciated for Hamnet and Living), but it isn’t what I’d expected. Those distinctive famous voices kept dispelling the illusion of the faraway idyll, especially whenever Ruffalo or Ferrell spoke.

I looked up the French cast anyway and was surprised to find any overlap with my viewing history. As it happens, Swann Arlaud, a.k.a. Anatomy of a Fall‘s defense attorney, is Iris’ father; and Louis Garrel, the German professor in Jo’s building in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, is one of the weirdos. (Farther out on the fun-trivia limb: Alma Jodorowsky, granddaughter of filmmaker and comics writer Alejandro Jodorowsky, is Iris’ mother.)

The Impressions: As time-travel sci-fi goes, Arco is extremely mild-mannered in both tone and consequence. Arco gets a single moment shouting, “No one should know the future…ever!”, but it’s a perfunctory shrug at butterfly-effect cognizance. He’s not even supposed to be here today, but his initial concerns about breaking the spacetime continuum are fleeting — no signs later that anything he does might’ve had repercussions in the end, neither devastating nor subtle. If his actions in this film somehow thwarted the rise of an alt-timeline where Iris would’ve died or turned into Distant-Future Nazi Edith Keeler if not for his unplanned intrusion, the world may never know.

Temporal mechanics and fraught tension aren’t among Bienvenu’s vested interests. Eventually we realize the weirdos aren’t quite the menaces we first thought despite all the chasing, but just as the lines of communication open, SUDDENLY THERE BE WILDFIRES. IS DISASTER FILM NOW. EVERYONE RUN RUN RUN OR DIE. Maybe in 2075 the environment is such a ubiquitous threat to life on Earth that spontaneously combustive viruses are a thing. The surprise catastrophe doesn’t get much foreshadowing setup, so the final act is mostly a Doctor Who team-sprint.

But for animation lovers, the real star here was never the plot or characters anyway. Bienvenu and his team offer a warm delicacy in their 2D animation, clearly Miyazaki-influenced but with rounder European edges for a slightly more Westernized design. (In comics terms, the house style here is on a spectrum between Mark Buckingham and Scott McCloud’s Zot!) Whether in the gentle scenes between two lonesome kids exploring the joy of human connection, or in the heavenward sequences after the magic suit’s inevitably fixed (as if that were in doubt), Arco is a slight yet nonetheless welcome 90-minute pleasantry.

I got a bit fidgety while watching, but afterward it was almost restful contemplating the little joys Arco brought Iris in her dysfunctional present — i.e., the underplayed hopes that It Gets Better. After all, she’s just learned the future has flying suits! And time travel! And way more man-made rainbows! And, because in time’s cyclical nature everything old is eventually new again, the future will also have loving in-person families! Maybe if there’s a sequel we’ll learn Arco’s era is so peachy-keen that all the human teachers also got their jobs back.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Arco end credits, but the job titles are rendered in a prismatic color-changing font for value-added scintillation.