‘Arco’ Director Ugo Bienvenu Discusses His Vision for Humanity’s Brighter Future in Animated Feature Form (NEW TRAILER)

[the_ad id=”3280664″]

A time-traveling 10-year-old boy from the future strikes up a friendship with a lonely young girl when he lands in the year 2075, in French illustrator-turned-director Ugo Bienvenu’s assured first feature, Arco. The stunningly visualized 2D feature won the top prize at the Annecy Festival in June and the Audience award at last month’s Animation Is Film festival and has slowly built a huge fan base among critics as it has premiered at animation events throughout the year.

Produced by Bienvenu, his co-writer Felix de Givry, Sophie Mas and Natalie Portman (who also lends her voice to the English-language version of the film), Arco is distributed by indie darling Neon, which also championed the Oscar-nominated Robot Dreams (2023) and the Oscar-winning Flee (2022).

The talented young director recently spoke to Animation Magazine from his home in Paris via Zoom:

Animation Magazine: Congratulations on the amazing success of your movie, Ugo. As we embark on a very busy awards season, can you tell us a bit about the origins of your imaginative movie?

Ugo Bienvenu: In the beginning, I thought perhaps it could be a short. I knew that making a feature film would be long and hard, but my partner told me we must do it in long form, so we made a small trailer, and then did the writing and the boarding. We did the first drawing back in 2020, so it took us five years to complete the movie.

We met a lot of people in France, and everyone told us that it was complicated to raise more than 6 million euros, and they didn’t get the script and didn’t know how to read storyboards. So, after three years of working, we did the writing and storyboards. But because nobody understood how to read the storyboards, we decided to put all our money in creating a complete, very precise black-and-white animatic with subtitles. We added the music by Arnaud Toulon. We worked on that for a year, and showed it to Sophie Mas and Natalie Portman of Mountain A. They decided to partner with us, and it took about three or four months to finance the whole movie. We built our studio in two weeks in Paris … with about 250 people, and we did the animation and backgrounds in about one year and two months!

You mostly used TVPaint and Photoshop, right?

Yes, we used paper for storyboards and writing. Then, we used TVPaint for the animatic and for the animation, because it’s a French company also! They are also a small family company (about 10 people); we wanted to help them out as well. We used Photoshop for the backgrounds, very simple tools

I don’t like the movies that use a lot of technologies; they kind of hide behind the techniques. I don’t like to see a director showing off and saying, “Look at me! I am doing this amazing shot.” I like to be as invisible as I can. The most important thing for me is the emotions and the simplicity. I would tell my team, “Imagine if we were making this movie in the ’60s or ’70s.” It’s made by hand, and on tablets, with limited technology. It’s the same way I draw comic books. For me, the simplest way of telling stories is often the best.

You mentioned that you made the film with about 250 people. Were they all based in Paris?

We worked with three studios. There was the big house in Paris, which served as the main studio, and then we had two other locations which were both about five minutes from here. I was working all day in the studios and talking to everybody there. We had about 150 persons drawing and the rest of it was production, sound design, voice recording and all that stuff. Our financers were telling us that we should send the work to other countries that were cheaper. I wanted fewer people on the project, but I wanted them to be the best ones. I was a teacher at Gobelins school, so we hired most of my students.

The COVID-19 shutdown was a bit of an inspiration for the isolated future world of Arco, right?

Yes, the idea came when the pandemic started, and I thought that we were living in such a dumb science fiction movie. In a way, I thought that science fiction produced the world we’re living in today. So, maybe it’s our turn to tell better stories and imagine a better ending and a more positive future. Because if we keep depicting bad things for humans’ future, then that’s what we’ll get. Maybe if we begin imagining the possibilities, that’s the only way things can improve.

Science fiction can usually be very cynical. I remember I was pissed off too, and I thought, well, being critical and cynical isn’t constructive at all. Look at ecology, that has been such a pain. We keep telling people you should do this or do that, and the exact opposite has happened. Maybe our common ecological goals can be an opportunity to bring humanity together again. Maybe this can be a way for us to fight for a common cause and fall in love. It’s the only way we can work together.

Did you fall in love with comics and animation at an early age? You’ve mentioned Miyazaki as a big influence.

When I was seven, I discovered Dragon Ball Z in my grandparents’ house because I couldn’t watch TV in my own house as my parents didn’t like it. I was blown away by that show. At the time, I was living in Chad, before we moved to Guatemala and then Mexico. (My father was a diplomat, so we moved a lot.) I thought those images were so new and so different. I thought, yes, you can do everything with drawing. So, I started to draw all the time. Then, when I was 14, I saw Princess Mononoke, and it felt like Miyazaki waved a magic wand like a fairy, put me under a spell and said, “You’ll do animation.” So, I studied animation, did animation all the time, started my own company in France when I was 23 and then formed Remembers with my partner Felix de Givry eight year later.

Because my dad was a diplomat, we were traveling to a new country every three years. I arrived in France when I was 15, learned to draw properly at École Estienne, got to Gobelins and then went to CalArts because I really wanted to see California and take classes in that school. Then, I returned to Paris to take more classes in a production school to learn how to finance movies in Europe.

Regarding my influences, beyond Miyazaki, I can mention a lot of other favorites, from Peter Pan, Bambi and Casper to Jumanji, When Harry Met Sally… and Stand By Me. There’s also the books of Marguerite Duras and Clifford D. Simak. I read a lot of Russian, French, American, Japanese literature. I rely on books much more when I’m working, because you don’t want to watch anything after staring at a screen all day. With books, you are the director of the story because you can imagine everything, and you won’t be influenced by someone else’s vision.

Arco offers hope about our future on this planet when we really need it. What do you hope audiences will take away from Arco and Iris’ adventure?

That it will inspire hope a little bit in the future on humanity. I also hope that we can rely on something else besides calculation and strategic planning, because all of that is making the world worse. I think we need to reconnect with our feelings and our experiences in the world. We have to work to make the world better for us, not for machines. The movie is all about questioning our humanity, and what we leave behind because of technological progress. I also hope it brings back our confidence in the power of imagination, in having ideas, believing in small things that are drawn on a page. Big things can begin as small drawings.

Your movie seems to be the perfect antidote to the world of AI right now and where the big companies are dragging us.

It’s interesting. When I have a bird in the movie, I want to use a bird’s real voice. For the robot in the movie, I thought it was right to use the voice of AI. It was so perfect that it conveyed no emotion at all. That taught me a lot about what our emotions rely on. I think we really recognize ourselves in errors and imperfections. There is a very old Greek expression that translates as, “From errors comes the right.” I really think for machines, it’s the opposite: “From the right, comes the wrong!”

Now, we have to defend our jobs in animation, because things can be lost in one generation. Many of the jobs that we love can disappear. I love this work. I think using our imagination is the best work. We can’t let machines take over the best parts of humanity, which is to dream. Imagination improves every part of our life. It colors even the small movements of our daily lives. I think it’s important to say that we are magical creatures that have intuition and subconscious. We can find things that are way beyond regular calculations. They are much deeper and more complex than numerical information. We have to rely on this magic that we have inside, which is much more powerful than numbers and machines.

Neon opens Arco in U.S. theaters on November 14. The film premiered in France in October.