Arco

Ugo Bienvenu's Arco won the European Film Award for Best Animated Feature in 2025, becoming the first French animation in over a decade to take the EFA in the category. Bienvenu, previously known as a graphic novelist (Préférence Système, Paiement Accepté) and short-film director, made his feature debut with this hand-drawn 2D production; the film was developed at his Remembers studio in collaboration with Folivari, the Belgian-French house that had previously produced Ernest & Celestine.

The film follows a young child named Arco who falls from the future into present-day Earth, where she meets a small girl living alone after her parents have disappeared. The two embark on a slow, visually inventive journey home (across landscapes that move between hand-drawn realism and ecstatic colour-field abstraction) and the film slowly reveals its central premise: the future Arco fell from is one her present-day actions are still capable of saving.

Bienvenu's animation register (clean line, generous negative space, a colour palette that owes something to early-1970s European children's books) is utterly distinct from the dominant Disney-Pixar mode and from the more familiar Studio Ghibli tradition. The film's themes (climate-grief, intergenerational responsibility, the agency of children to act on adult problems) are handled without polemic. Arco arrived in a remarkable year for European animation that also produced Bienvenu's compatriots' work and the global success of Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis.