In a new featurette, director Ugo Bienvenu shows how a music video he directed laid the groundwork for the Academy Award nominee
The Best Animated Feature Academy Award nominee Arco tells the story of a young girl named Iris who lives in the year 2075, in an era where humanity is overly reliant on technology, and Earth is subject to environmental disasters like massive daily wildfires. Disconnected from her parents, Iris is depressed, though her life changes for the brighter with the arrival of Arco, a boy from the future who travels through time using a rainbow cape and body suit. The film is the feature-length debut of French director Ugo Bienvenu, who honed his painterly visual style in previous short films and music videos. In fact, according to a new featurette shared with Polygon via Arco’s distributor Neon, one particular music video from Bienvenu’s library had a direct impact on Arco‘s widely praised artwork.
In the featurette, “When Félix & Ugo first met,” Bienvenu and his co-screenwriter Félix de Givry share how they met on the set of French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s 2014 film Eden and quickly began talking about working together. Their first collaboration was a 2015 music video for the French electropop band Jabberwocky, for its song “Fog.” As de Givry explains in the featurette, “In that 2015 Jabberwocky video, there are many things that foreshadow Arco, like the character who falls. There are also those characters wearing rainbow glasses, which we also see the three brothers wear in Arco.”
Watching Jabberwocky’s “Fog” music video, anyone who has seen Arco will immediately notice the close similarity of the opaque, multi-hued glasses. But the “falling character with clothing billowing around them” comparison is even more striking. The Arco featurette provides a brief side-by-side comparison of the two scenes. They’re so similar that the music video could be mistaken for an Arco animation test.
Also in the featurette, Bienvenu points out that Arco’s robot nanny character Mikki first appeared in a separate music video for “Sphere of Influence,” a song by French musician Antoine Kogut. Since then, Mikki has featured in all of Bienvenu’s projects, so it’s unlikely that Arco will be the last we see of him.
