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There are grey clouds over Los Angeles, and the sky is spitting. “It never rains in LA,” says Ugo Bienvenu. “But every time I come here, it rains.” For the past eight months, the French animator has been on the campaign trail, in LA and elsewhere, with Arco, which was nominated for best animated feature at the Oscars on Sunday. It’s a gorgeous family animation, combining ET’s big heart with the artistry of Studio Ghibli. But travelling has meant being absent for long stretches from his home in Paris, where he lives with his wife and two small children.
This trip, Bienvenu’s family has flown out to LA with him for the first time, which explains why he’s speaking to me over a video call from a drizzly garden. “I’m outside, so they can make noise,” he says, lighting a cigarette. As he paces, I catch a glimpse through the patio doors of his four-year-old daughter kneeling at the coffee table, colouring.
We’re speaking a couple of weeks before the Oscars. In the end, his little indie couldn’t halt the category juggernaut KPop Demon Hunters – but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Arco is a little wonder of a film, with a hopeful vision of a better, kinder future.
I ask Bienvenu if he is an optimist by nature. He shakes his head. “No! I am a super pessimistic guy.” But when he started writing a family film he was already thinking about having children. “I didn’t want my kids in 10 or 15 years to look at my work and say, ‘Oh, Papa was so cynical.’ I wanted them to feel as if I tried to build something, to bring light, to bring hope.”
It was 2019 when he embarked on the script with co-writer Félix de Givry. The world already looked bleak, he tells me. “It felt like we were living in a really bad science fiction movie, and that it was going to get worse.” Then Covid happened. “I felt the world going really hard. So I thought: OK, now I need softness; now I need tenderness. I’m going do a hug with this movie.”
And what a hug. Arco tells the story of a 10-year-old boy from the year 2932, where humans have learned to live in harmony with nature. One day, Arco steals a time-travel cloak, and crash lands in the year 2075. In this time zone, the world is in the midst of environmental collapse, buffeted by storms and wildfires. But Arco is rescued by a kind 10-year-old called Iris. Among the cast of characters is a nanny-bot and a trio of endearingly hapless baddies straight out of Scooby-Doo (voiced in the English dub by Will Ferrell, Flea and Andy Samberg).
Bienvenu reels off the film’s messages: it’s about imagination (“Saying to the kids and to their parents that if we don’t want to live in that world, we just have to think differently”); and reframing how we see the climate crisis (“If we see it as punishment, then we’re dead. We can see it first as an opportunity for human beings to fight together, and not against each other, for something”). It’s also about meeting the future straight on. “It’s really important to say to the kids, ‘We have to face things, we have to face our reality and look it in the eyes.’ It’s not easy, but we can make it.”
Bienvenu is wearing a baseball cap to keep out the drizzle, embroidered with images of Peter Pan and Wendy. There is something a little Peter Pan-ish about the man. For a start, he looks a good 10 years younger than his 40. It’s his attitude, too; open and unembarrassed to be heartfelt.
He is the son of a graphic designer mother and a diplomat father. Because of his father’s job, he spent his childhood in Guatemala, Mexico, Chad and France, surrounded by culture: “A ton of books, always.” Age 14, Bienvenu watched Studio Ghibli’s animation Princess Mononoke and discovered his vocation.
Clearly, he is a man who gets a lot done. Age 23, he started his first company, and today runs six of them out of his Paris studio, including a book publisher. His own graphic novel, System Preference, has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Bienvenu also designs scarves for the luxury fashion brand Hermès, and dabbles in art direction for Chanel. Is he a workaholic? “No. I’m not workaholic,” he replies. “It’s about using the energy that comes to me and trying to orient it in the best way I can. I have 40 people in my studio and all of them are my friends. As I work a lot, it’s the way for me to work with my friends.”
Getting the funding for Arco was a struggle, with rejection followed by rejection. “Everyone said it was impossible. They told us Arco had no antagonist and the characters were weak. It broke us.” In the end, Bienvenu and his producing partner ploughed €300,000 of their own money into the project and worked flat out for six months. “At the end we had no money left, but we had 45 minutes of animatic.” He shares an agent with Natalie Portman, who came on board as producer after watching the animatic – an animated storyboard of the film.
Now, Bienvenu is looking forward to getting back to Paris. “I want to go back to my life. I also need to go back to work because it’s been eight months. People don’t say it, but you are not paid to do the campaigns. I have to provide work to the 40 people in the studio.”
Has he thought about upping sticks to Los Angeles permanently? A shake of the head. “I don’t think I could work in Hollywood. There’s too much money pressure. My movie cost €9m; an average Pixar or Disney movie costs $200m. That’s why they all look the same – because they are so afraid of losing money.” But there have been offers? “Yes,” he concludes, “but I want to stay indie.”
