The kid who fell to Earth: "Arco"

The last of this year's Oscar-nominated animated shorts to reach these shorts may be the most classically animated of the lot: Arco sees French artisans doing a hand-drawn approximation of the Japanese comic-book style, with a dash of Seventies album cover Roger Dean visible in their futuristic cityscapes. The storytelling, meanwhile, is taking a note or two from a hall-of-fame family film in Spielberg's E.T. - not a bad template for co-writer/director Ugo Bienvenu to start from, but also a perilously high bar for a creative team to be setting themselves. At the film's centre is the formative - timeline-shifting, indeed - friendship between Iris (voiced in the original subtitled version by Margot Ringard Oldra, and by Romy Fay in the dub), a young inhabitant of a near-future Earth beset by the consequences of climate change, and the titular Arco (Oscar Tresanini in French, Juliano Krue Valdun in English), an accidental time traveller in a rainbow-hued cape who falls to Earth one day, oblivious to our destructive ways. Iris's task, in between looking after a younger sibling, is to figure out how to return this warning from the future to sender, ideally before the end of the world as we know it. One possible reason for the film's late arrival in UK cinemas: it's quite a tough sell once you know where it's heading, and one suspects no-one really knew what to do with it. (The illustrious redub is an optimistic shot in the dark, and that might be the only truly optimistic thing about Arco.)

For one thing, Bienvenu's film proceeds in a mishmash of styles and tones that recalls Japanese animation's more confounding extremes: Iris and Arco's heartfelt connection gets intercut, more than a little clumsily, with the blundering misadventures of three supremely annoying stooges sent out in pursuit of our hero. (In the English dub, the trio have been revoiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg and Flea off of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and not even these three can do much between them to stave off an air of the more forgettable Saturday morning cartoons.) Gradually, this story reveals itself to be simultaneously a) for kids, primarily and b) too despairing for most kids to bear: what's being refracted to create Arco's lovely multicoloured vapour trail is, to all intents and purposes, the last light in the universe. It feels an especially morose plot point that Iris and her siblings have been left to fend for themselves: with their parents away (on business?), regulation childcare has been farmed out to faintly creepy-seeming robots, and the insinuation is that these kids won't be getting any more help from their elders when it comes to apocalypse avoidance. We're headed to a broadly punitive finale, as visitors from the future show up to save their kid while leaving Earth to burn (thanks a bunch, Mr. and Mrs. Arco), a major bummer over which Bienvenu decides to layer an appallingly drippy sadcore ballad. If you are taking your own children, it might be an idea to remove them of their belts and shoelaces beforehand.

Arco is now playing, in both subtitled and dubbed versions, in selected cinemas.