I got to the cinema for the second time this year the other night, and saw the film Flow. Flow is a Latvian animated film directed by Gints Zilbalodis, which recently won the Oscar for best animated feature. It’s a beautiful film which I enjoyed a lot.
Some spoilers ahead
The story is about an unnamed cat (at least, we never learn a name) which finds itself in the middle of a great flood–waters are rising and covering everything. The cat finds rescue in a drifting sailboat, deserted except for a capybara. Eventually, they are joined by an assortment of other creatures, primarily a ring-tailed lemur, a Labrador Retriever, and a huge white secretary bird. The movie follows this odd assortment of animals as they struggle to survive and have a variety of adventures.
The whole movie passes without any dialogue, unless we count the sounds the various animals are making. It’s clear that they are trying to communicate with each other in the ways that animals do, but we can only understand what we might glean from watching real animals as they interact.
This is indeed one of the most notable things about Flow–the animals are almost completely non-anthropomorphic. There are things they do from time to time that you wouldn’t expect to see a real animal do–like steer a boat, for instance–but the way they do everything is pretty much the way real animals do. Or at least, that’s true for the cat and the dog; I can’t really speak to the others since I’m less familiar with the behavioral ticks of capybaras and lemurs.
It gives the movie a really terrific feeling of realism and authenticity. When the cat is scared, it feels like a scared cat, not like a cute cartoon cat. The same applies when the cat is sleeping, or the dog is trying to play, or the capybara is swimming. It’s not that the film chases bizarre photorealistic of something like The Lion King remake (thank goodness!), but there’s obviously an effort to present the world and the characters that inhabit it in as naturalistic a way as possible. It’s an approach that is not without risk, but which pays off well.
I was always completely engaged and never bored (the fact that the film is less than 90 minutes helped as well), and the movie kept me invested in its characters by just letting me observe what they were doing as I traveled along with them. In some ways it reminded me of the first twenty minutes of Wall-E; or what that whole movie would have been if we’d never launched into space and onto that silly ship.
I’m not a great aficionado of animation by any stretch, so it’s not easy for me to pick apart what makes Flow‘s visual style stand out; but I will say I thought the whole thing was beautiful to look at. Apparently it was all produced in Blender–a free and open-source animation software.
The results aren’t as nuanced as what you expect to see in classic Pixar film for instance; nor are they as wildly innovative as something like Across the Spider-Verse. But they are clean and lovely and do a great job of showcasing the familiar-yet-still-alien world that the movie is set in.
This is not just the regular world. These animals don’t all come from the same place, for instance. and these is a sort of timeless, mythological feeling to the remnants of human civilisation that they come across.
We never get any sort of clear idea what is actually going on with the disaster the cat is trying to survive. It’s evident that there were human beings around at some point, but there’s no sign of them now.
The flood waters seem to be coming from the earth as much as anything else (as opposed to from the rain). There is a dramatic sequence toward the end where the water recede dramatically, seeming to sink into great fissures in the ground. But the implication may be that it’s all happening on some sort of cycle–near the start of the film there’s a shot of a boat stuck in tree, as if the waters had risen and receded in the past.
And there are other strange or mystical things going on as well. The group encounters on a couple of occasions a really, really bizarre-looking whale. My one daughter speculated that it was supposed to be something that had been freed from the ice by the disaster, while Wikipedia just refers to it as a “mutated whale”. And there is another bit where one of the animals, along with the cat, starts to just float into the sky in some symbolic representation of death or attaining enlightenment or something.
The cat returns to the ground but its companion just vanishes into the light, not to be seen again.
The movie deals with a variety of serious themes and the situation that the characters are in is obviously serious with dire stakes, but the movie remains hopeful and upbeat the entire time. Other than the strange sequence I described in the previous paragraph, you never have to deal with the tragic death of any of the protagonists (as long as we don’t count the various fish that they eat), as this isn’t the sort of film to go for such an obvious emotional tug to keep you connected. It’s smarter than that, and I think ultimately more meaningful.
Plus I love cats. So the movie was a winner for me.
