The critically acclaimed creator Ugo Bienvenu has long moved fluidly between disciplines – illustration, animation and music videos – but his feature debut has positioned him as one of the most intriguing new voices in animation.
He was also nominated for one of this year’s Academy Awards. On Oscar night, two smaller European productions rightly went toe to toe with such megabudget studio products as Zootroplis 2 and Elio. Both Little Amélie or the Character of Rain and Bienvenu’s Arco premiered to swooning notices at Cannes film festival in 2025. Bienvenu’s film, an optimistic science-fiction tale, had already scored two awards at the Césars, aka the French Oscars, and one at the Annies, the top animation awards.
“I don’t enjoy it as much as I should,” the disarmingly honest director says. “I’m always stuck between wanting to be with my kids and thinking, ‘Oh, I should be doing that for the movie’. It’s once in a lifetime. The Césars was such a moving night, with a lot of people who worked for a long time on the movie. The Oscars are bigger than everybody. It’s a lot of people’s dream. I couldn’t say it’s mine. But I’m happy to be there.”
He smiles. “Sorry, it’s a really honest answer, because I’m super tired.”
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Long before the film made the shortlist for the Oscars, Arco – which he hopes is a cinematic hug for polarised times – had attracted Hollywood patronage. Natalie Portman played a crucial role in getting the project off the ground after she and Sophie Mas, who was one of the team behind May December and Ad Astra, saw an early version and came on board as producers, helping to secure financing.
“They asked us, what do you need from us?” Bienvenu says. “And we said, we need you to protect the movie. And they did.”
Portman also helped to assemble the English-language voice cast, which includes Will Ferrell, Mark Ruffalo, America Ferrera and Andy Samberg, as well as voicing two characters herself.
It’s easy to see why Portman was so enamoured. Arco, a big-hearted, thrilling animation, pivots on a deceptively simple premise: a mischievous 10-year-old boy from a distant, peaceful future accidentally travels back in time to the year 2075, where he befriends a curious and adventurous girl named Iris. Together the two navigate a world increasingly defined by environmental instability and technological mediation.
What does it mean, the film essentially asks, to grow up in a rapidly changing, endangered world.
“It was my first movie, and sometimes when people tell you something you think maybe they are right, when you should just say no, they are not right,” says Bienvenu, who is also the film’s writer. “I redid a lot of things because of notes, and in the end I often returned to my first version anyway.
“I didn’t trust it at the beginning, and sometimes I thought maybe I was wrong. Making the film taught me a lot about trusting my first insight and my first instinct. That first impulse often carries something honest, something fragile. When you lose that, you can lose the soul of what you were trying to make in the first place.”
The film’s ambitions extend beyond aesthetics. Through Iris’s world, Bienvenu confronts the reality of climate change and environmental instability.
The films Bienvenu admired as a child – stories like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Bambi, The Sword in the Stone and Babar: The Movie – treated young viewers with intellectual respect, exploring themes of life, death and responsibility.
Bienvenu was determined to carry that same philosophy forward, which is why, with Arco, rather than shield younger audiences from difficult truths, he deliberately embraces them.
“Every human is made of the same material: emotions, feelings and relationships to the physical world and to the elements,” he says. “Children and adults are not different species. We are the same species. When I was a kid I felt that nobody respected the adult that was inside me. Now that I’m an adult I sometimes feel that the child inside me is not respected either. So I wanted to make a movie that respects all those people and all those ages. It’s really the same film whether you are a child or an adult.”
Bienvenu’s path to film-making was shaped by a global upbringing. The son of a French diplomat, raised in Mexico, Guatemala, Chad and the United States, he was immersed in a collage of cultural influences that echo loudly throughout his Day-Glo feature. The visual language of American advertising that he encountered in Mexico and Guatemala, for example – ubiquitous billboards for brands like Coca-Cola and Marlboro – left a lasting impression.
[ Off to the Oscars: The Irish animated film that’s making a big splash worldwideOpens in new window ]
A defining influence arrived when Bienvenu was seven years old and he encountered the anime series Dragon Ball Z. The show’s explosive visual energy and boundless imagination inspired him to start drawing.
“Like many of my contemporaries, we were struck by Japanese animation early in our lives, and also by American animation and European animation,” he says. “So it’s really a blend of all of this, and I also lived abroad during my youth. That shaped me in an unconscious way. Americans stay very American, and Japan stays very Japanese, but in Europe we take everything and mix it. At the same time we remain European in the core of the work and in the way of thinking – in the timing and the sensibility.”
Arco arrives a year after the Oscar-winning box-office hit Flow, Gints Zilbalodis’s tale of a solitary cat navigating a mysterious, flooded post-human world with unlikely animal friends. The post-Covid era has proved a fascinating moment for European animation. The Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen pushed boundaries with Flee, an animated documentary exploring refugee experiences, while The Summit of the Gods, a French-Belgian coproduction, adapted a Japanese manga into a gripping, visually stunning adventure that found a huge audience on Netflix.
“I think it’s not only European animation,” Bienvenu says. “It’s animation or movies that are done with passion, and not just money. I think people can feel it now, which is great. When something is made with passion there is something honest inside it, and audiences recognise that.
“For me that’s what matters the most: not where the film comes from but why it exists. When you make something because you really believe in it, people feel that sincerity. I think that’s why some films can travel everywhere and connect with audiences, even when they are very specific or come from a different culture. I think it’s really interesting what is happening right now in European animation, even if it’s also a dangerous moment for us.”
He envisaged the defiantly hopeful Arco as the “best-possible outcome” for fractured times. It’s an invitation to process difficult realities such as climate change and AI with empathy.
“The world feels very separated right now,” the director says. “Communities are separated, and even generations are separated. We spend a lot of time fighting for our differences, but in fact we don’t have so many differences.
“Fighting about them is a loss of time in a moment of history when we really need to be together. Maybe it’s the first time in humanity when we have so much to do collectively. Sometimes it feels like we are losing precious time arguing instead of building something together. When Covid happened and the world became harder, I realised I needed to be reassured. I thought maybe other people needed that too.”
Forget awards season. The film-maker’s proudest moments come from watching teary multigenerational audiences.
“A thing I saw a lot in cinemas that made me proud was grandmothers and grandsons crying at the same time and laughing at the same time,” he says. “People sometimes think it’s a very intellectual movie, but I also wanted to make a fun movie: something you can simply enjoy. In cinema we often create this division where an auteur film is supposed to be serious and maybe boring, while entertainment is supposed to be simple. I don’t believe that. I think you can do both.”
Arco is in cinemas from Friday, March 20th
