There is a detail about Ugo Bienvenu that tells you everything about how he works. On Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve’s 2014 drama about the early French house scene and its proximity to Daft Punk, Bienvenu served as a hand double for the lead actor. Félix de Givry, who plays the central character, didn’t know how to draw. So every time the film needed hands moving across a page, they used Bienvenu’s. It is a fitting origin story for a filmmaker whose entire philosophy is built on the idea that drawing is not preparation for cinema. It is cinema.
Is AI Coming for Your Job? The New Reality for White-Collar Workers
Bienvenu is 38, French, and sitting in London’s Durrant’s Hotel working through duck pasta when we meet. The previous week, his directorial debut Arco received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. Tonight he has a post-screening Q&A with Natalie Portman, who produced the film, moderated by Alfonso Cuarón. He drops names the way someone does when the names keep showing up on their phone: Brady Corbet was full of praise, Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk called it the best film he has ever seen, Steven Spielberg sent a letter. What Bienvenu finds most meaningful is something slightly different. “I love that directors don’t talk about it as an animated film,” he says. “They see it as an actual movie.”
Project Hail Mary Shatters Records To Become The Highest Grossing Film For Amazon MGM
Arco was written by Bienvenu and de Givry, who first met on the set of Eden, and its world carries a trace of that shared history. Set in 2075, the film follows Iris, a 10-year-old girl who eats dinner with holograms of her perpetually absent parents and is raised by an android nanny named Mikki, voiced simultaneously by Portman and Mark Ruffalo. Her world cracks open when she encounters Arco, a 9-year-old boy who has traveled back from 2932. He is being chased by three conspiracy theorists played by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea. The science, Bienvenu is quick to acknowledge, does not entirely hold together. That is precisely the point. “A producer told me that what I couldn’t explain, shouldn’t be in the movie,” he says. “But I realized that everything I couldn’t understand had to be in the movie, because it was deeper than me.”
Where most science fiction reaches for dystopia as its default register, Arco refuses that comfort. Its 2075 is frightening and salvageable at once. Fires burn across the landscape but corners of nature have survived. Bienvenu sees the world he built not as speculation but as mild exaggeration. Mikki is AI. The holograms are Zoom calls. The indifference is already here. What the film argues, quietly and with considerable visual beauty, is that imagination is the only force capable of changing any of it. “If we want things to change,” he says, “we have to imagine how we want the world first.”
For 15 years before Arco, Bienvenu was authoring graphic novels, including 2019’s System Preference, whose android character Mikki migrated directly into the film. His 2D animation has drawn repeated comparisons to Studio Ghibli, and Bienvenu accepts the comparison with characteristic precision. The overlaps he identifies are specific: the absence of violence, the role of the unconscious, the relationship between humans and the natural world. In France, he says, people always compared him to Moebius rather than Miyazaki. He has since learned that Miyazaki was himself influenced by Moebius, which closes a loop he finds genuinely moving. “I’m honored,” he says, “because Miyazaki is one of the best artists ever. Sometimes people want to put you in a box. But to me, it’s the best box ever.”
He is less generous on the subject of AI, which he raises without prompting and dismisses without hesitation. Storytelling comes from human emotion. AI runs on data. The distinction, for him, is not technical but existential. Imagination, he says, is what happens in the unoccupied mind. On the walk to the bathroom. Over a stove. In the silence before a phone rings. “We used to be in the cave of our subconscious, finding ideas,” he says. “We really have to stop doing all this shit with AI and phones, and go back to our inner selves.” From a director whose hands were in the frame long before his name was on the poster, it lands less like a talking point and more like a conviction he has been carrying for years.
