Unveiled at Cannes and Cristal at the Annecy Festival, Arco [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Ugo Bienvenu
scheda film], Ugo Bienvenu's first feature film, is being released today in French cinemas by Diaphana.

Cineuropa: How did the character of Arco, the rainbow child, come about?
Ugo Bienvenu: I had received many requests to adapt my comic book System Preference for the cinema, but I turned them down because I felt that cinema suffers greatly from not producing original stories: adaptations often end up producing “Frankenstein” films. This gave me the idea of making a feature film, and I thought about the films that had shaped me. They were the ones from my childhood: cartoons, but also Jumanji, Casper, etc. As I wanted to make a film that would be important in the lives of those who watched it, I decided to think first and foremost about children. Secondly, I am a Science Fiction author, and when I started writing the film, it was during the Covid pandemic, and the world resembled a bad science fiction film. I felt a responsibility to be constructive, not just to criticise reality and say that everything was going to go wrong. If you want good things to happen, you have to think about them first. And one day, the character of Arco was born: I drew a head in the sky, I put a rainbow trail behind this little character, I showed it to my partner Félix de Givry, and the feature film machine started to get going.

What about a story incorporating a dual future (a 2075 relatively similar to our own era and a much more distant future resembling the Garden of Eden)?
The films that shaped me trust in children's intelligence: Bambi, Pinocchio, Brisby and The Secret of NIMH, etc. In my opinion, the role of fiction is to strengthen our emotional muscles to prepare us for reality and to face similar critical situations: if we get lost in the woods, we think back to Hansel and Gretel and we don't break down. I didn't want to lie to children: they are going to live in a world where there will always be storms and fires, a highly technological world of withdrawal and indifference. But if we reconnect with our emotions and sensations, with physically experiencing the world, with sharing, love, friendship, human adventures, if we trust in the little things again, we may be able to save ourselves. So the idea of the double future was to tell children that even if things don't look good for tomorrow, by reconnecting with each other, the day after tomorrow might be better. For the distant future from which Arco comes, I drew on archetypes and the collective unconscious to move the story along more quickly. In all of humanity's ancestral stories, there are gardens in the sky and a life in harmony with nature. But since it's a utopia, it had to be simple and not too defined in the film because it's a world that we all have to invent for ourselves.

What tone did you want to develop?
I wanted to bring some gentleness to the film. In the same vein as Miyazaki, I feel that I am not giving in to violence. The only characters in my film who get slapped are the robots. There are no big villains: the main antagonist is our world and what we do with it. Because our reality is complex, there isn't just good and evil, but many grey areas in between.

Why did you choose 2D?
I am an illustrator, and my greatest joy is being moved by a line. Drawing is a sensory reality that passes through the hand and the brain. Automation in animation is supposedly cheaper, but Arco cost $140 million less than its Oscar-nominated American competitors made in this way, and $15 million less than the cheapest Japanese film. It's amusing to note that we were sold the 3D economic model, which was supposed to control costs but in fact causes them to skyrocket.

The film raises the question of the grip of technology and human nature.
Previously, technology allowed humans to free up time to think, come up with ideas, dream, and imagine how to improve the world. But in recent decades, especially since the introduction of smartphones, it has turned into a technology that pulls us away from ourselves, from our inner theatre. Arco's idea is to believe in what cannot be calculated. We have a powerful engine within us, the unconscious, intuition, which allows us to arrive at the right result without calculation and which can spread. Whereas the computer calculates everything for a rather limited result because it is very rigid and cannot integrate anything beyond itself. Artificial intelligence is the world of non-experience. We recognise ourselves in our faults, not in perfection. A work of art must be vibrant, transcribing the energy of life. The shock we feel when faced with an AI image or text is that we cannot recognise where they come from because they come from the world of the dead, a world that stops at a finite reference point.