Arco review – Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo lead rainbow-hued eco animation

2026-03-18 - 13:19

Portman and Ruffalo join the English voice cast of this film about a time-travelling boy from Earth’s drowned future and a girl with a robot nanny This animated feature has lots going for it: expressive character design, a delicately melancholy musical score, and plenty of strong emotional beats, but the script is a touch too derivative for its own good. Not that little kids are likely to notice or care much about low-level plot-point larceny, and the youngest will be positively bewitched by the super-saturated palette that swirls rainbows all over everything. It’s like the animation equivalent of that classroom art-lesson trick where you hold a bunch of crayons at once to draw the seven rainbow colours of refracted light; the intensity gets to be a bit much after a while. Literally riding the rainbow here is title character Arco (voiced by Juliano Krue), a 10-year-old boy from far in the future, who longs to go travelling back in time like his big sister and parents. The older family members have to don a special rainbow-coloured cloak, powered by a sparkly diamond thingy in order to visit, say, the dinosaurs. They do this to gather resources because in the future the Earth is a drowned planet and people live on man-made platforms that are stacked up to the sky. Arco is legally too young to time travel, but he steals his sister’s kit to go rainbow-slaloming in the relatively primitive era of 2075, when most of the film takes place. Continue reading...