Going with “Flow” (2024)

 

Not to put too fine a point on It, but Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow is one of the most beautiful animated features I’ve seen in a while. Yes, I loved The Wild Robot, but Flow appeals to my seven of simplicity in storytelling and the inhabiting of the wordless world of animals. 

Our initial and main protagonist is a black cat whom we encounter exploring the woods around a house with a garden populated by giant cat sculptures. She - it’s not clearly delineated what orientation the cat is, but “she” feels right right now - is out exploring when she comes across a pack of dogs fighting over a fish that she nabs and runs off with the canines in hot pursuit. 

They chase her and she loses them but we quickly see them returning ahead of a flock of deer fleeing from some great terror. That little drama of how will she get out of this becomes, dear God, it’s a tsunami. It ins’t long before she finds her way to the house and we see a workshop where a drawing of a cat begins floating in the rising water. Eventually, she makes her way to the tallest cat sculpture as it submerges quickly. She’s able to board an abandoned junk with one of the sleepiest capybaras I’ve ever seen. This guy, I tell ya. 

What’s impressive is the lack of anthropomorphism at this point. Cat acts like cat; capybara acts like capybara until you do have to ask, “do they?” Absent the cartoony caricatures that exaggerate animal features to render them more humanly relatable, the knee-jerk assumption is that, why, of course, these are animals acting like animals. Until they’re not.

There is minute detail to animal movement and behavior, but as the junk takes on a larger crew - a ring-tail lemur, a white lab from earlier in the movie and a secretary bird cat has a distinct bond with since the bird fought for her flock for her - we see displays of, well, teamwork and empathy that might not necessarily be absent from our friends here, but navigating a junk through the sunken ruins of what looks alike a Southeast Asian temple compound, calls up intelligence and tool usage I wouldn’t necessarily apply to our feline, rodent, or avian cousins. 

And yet it all works. The sense of camaraderie is unforced and with the lack of spoken dialog, there is a refreshing lack of exposition and much freer expression of the interior lives of our characters. Naturally, this smacks of those idiot wildlife adventures I grew up with where narratives and motives are forced on animals in the bush, but here’s the difference; no one’s telling you this; it’s happening organically because, of course, it’s fiction, a fable. 

I don’t have an issue with some of the more cartoony elements because they enter in relatively subtly and if you haven’t figured out that you’re watching a fabulist story, then I can’t help you in terms of how to relate to a fictional narrative. That said, there is a striking lack of tension in the tale.

When our heroes encounter a drifting boat populated by other ring-tailed lemurs, there’s a moment where it might seem they’re not as evolved as our friend and there might be ill-will afoot, but it’s not really explored enough to set up any kind of meaningful stakes or conflicts. Later, when the rest of the pack that had chased Cat earlier in the film is found stranded in the portico of a ruin likely headed for submersion, our crew takes them on (much to the chagrin of Lemur, Cat, and Secretary bird; capybara really just doesn’t care) but not much develops beyond this. The pack is just kind of stupid and selfish (one dog willy-nilly gobbles up the fist that Cat had brought for the crew, for example). In fact, they count for so little that during a storm sequence, they just kind of vanish from any of the scenes in that sequence. 

What does work is the sense of scope of this sunken world and the drifting through it our friends do. Is this allegorical? Of course, but it’s not so heavy-handed to be distracting. If anything, it rather reinforces the necessity of the allegory. Humanity’s absence is the poignant central detail; the erasure of us from the proceedings renders the film more compelling. 

The immensity of the canvas negates any senes of threat in the same way that when considering the animal kingdom and nature in general, ‘threat’ is relative to the specific prey-predator relationship or to the massive shifts in habitable environment due to climate change. These are issues that humans still don’t have the capacity to grasp or understand. To them, a bunny being brought down by fox is just one animal as food for another; climate change and environmental collapse doesn’t seem to register with most. Thus, in the context of Flow, the largeness of any apocalypse is overshadowed by this immensity which is transformed into a kind of wonder. 

When Cat is tossed from the boat and lands on terra firms that takes her up these Andean type structures, she finds Serectary bird and they spend time looking out at the vastness before them. And then, as if gravity is shifting, droplets of water rise around them, as they do, as well. Bird continues to fly upward to some central bright light and Cat floats back to earth. It’s a staggering, beautiful interlude. 

Eventually, the waters recede, the forests rise again, Cat finds her friends, and even the whale that had been guide and savior at different points, resurrects in the post-credits. I was moved at a number of points, and despite certain passages that could have been elided with no major change to the film (except making it fleeter and more economic), genuinely glad I saw Flow.

Zilbalodis wrote the script with Mattis Kaža, edited the film, and co-composed the score. There’s a singularity of a visionary here with a beautiful, rich vision.