The rest of 2025 is stacked with some highly anticipated animated films, like Zootopia 2 and Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet, but Arco‘s new trailer may have made it the most anticipated of all. It’s a 2D-animated film “filled with hope and optimism for our future,” according to its official description, about a rainbow-clad, time-traveling boy trying to get back home.
Instead of traveling to our present, or even further back, Arco travels from his future to 2075, where a young girl, Iris, finds him — after he fell from the sky, leaving a glorious rainbow in his wake. Together, Arco and Iris “may also be the only ones who can save our planet.”
Director Ugo Bienvenu says in a news release that Arco lands in a time when “our mistakes (augmented reality, ultra-communication, controlled society, ecological problems, robots taking over human tasks…) have cut humanity off from itself.” He says the world of 2075 is an “extreme caricature” of the past few years.
The trailer is full of interesting visuals, like a classroom of kids being taught in a projection of outer space and another shot of kids running while dinosaurs tower over them. Overall, it looks beautifully animated and stylized, and a reminder that non-Studio Ghibli 2D animation ain’t dead yet.
Arco‘s English voice cast includes Will Ferrell, America Ferrera, Flea (Flea?!), Mark Ruffalo, Andy Samberg, and Natalie Portman, who is also a producer on the film. In the United States, Arco will be released in “select theaters” on Nov. 14. It’ll be distributed by Neon, the film company that’s on a hot streak after releases like Anora and Longlegs.
