Flow

Stop us if you think you’ve heard this one before. In a new family-friendly animated film, a gang of cute animals must overcome obstacles to learn the true meaning of friendship. Sound familiar? On its watery surface, Flow seems to take the form of ghosts of animated past — and yet, there is really nothing quite like it. Made on a shoestring budget by a tiny team in Latvia, Belgium and France, led by multi-talented filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis (whose 2019 feature debut, Away, was similarly awe-inspiring and philosophical), this is a spectacular, singular slice of computer-generated cinema — doing things only animation can do.

In its scope and vision, Flow feels both maximalist (Zilbalodis conjures vast oceans and mysterious skyscraping temples) and minimalist: there is zero dialogue, beyond various animal grunts, baked inside a fiercely simple story. Our hero is a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed house cat, who seems to live a quiet, solitary life in the apparent home of a feline-loving human artist. But the humans are inexplicably nowhere to be seen, their fingerprints seemingly only on the edges of the frame, the animals left to their own devices.

When an unstoppable rising tsunami — from where? — suddenly envelops the known world, the cat finds sanctuary in a rickety sailboat, where it improbably joins a small menagerie of animals: a goofy, puppyish golden retriever, a covetous lemur, a stately secretary bird, and a calm, centred capybara. If there’s one thing a cat hates more than water, it is dogs, but somehow, together, this mismatched gang are forced to navigate an unpredictable aquatic apocalypse: like 2012, but with more barking and squawking.

Its composition and craft is exceptionally cinematic.

If that sounds like same-old-same-old, well, it is decidedly not. This film is very much its own beast. The aesthetic, for example, is so unusual that it may take your eyes a little initial adjustment, the animation produced entirely on the free-to-use open-source software Blender. The handsome golden-hour backdrops — Zilbalodis has a Miyazakian eye for the natural world, and shares that director’s love of cats — and scrappy, lightly pixelated brushstroke design evoke the textures of video games; Breath Of The Wild, Ico, and Abzû all feel like near-cousins. Yet its composition and craft is exceptionally cinematic.

Some of the approach here is fantastical and fabular — a kind of mythical leviathan seems to stalk the waters, and there is nothing especially realistic about animals steering a boat — and yet the character animation grounds it all. Unlike the cartoon creatures we’re used to seeing — walking on their hind legs, talking with celebrity voices — this is one of the few animated films to take a serious study of animal movements, a fealty to biology. They act and move and behave as animals would. They are impetuous, instinctual, driven by fight-or-flight. The dog likes to wee on things. The cat licks its own genitals. But the great magic trick here is that we still care so deeply for them, despite it not following the usual animation rules. We feel their tension, we worry for them, we cheer their wins, we mourn their losses.

There is in fact great loss in this film. The fact that the animal characters are unable to adequately express or articulate that loss only makes it sadder: theirs is a childlike impotence, against forces they neither understand nor have any power to stop. Zilbalodis also serves as co-composer, his brooding and minimalistic score (like something by Philip Glass or Max Richter) establishing a strangely sad, pensive tone.

Death and disquiet haunt these simple creatures. In one extraordinary sequence, a beloved character seems to transcend the mortal plane; in another, the cat has a vivid dream of a deer cyclone, their stampeding hooves a portent of something darker. As an entry in the ever-growing apocalyptic canon, it feels like an apt reflection of our anxious times, a modern retelling of the ancient flood myths, and the film’s constantly rising sea levels nod to some version of our own future where the climate crisis is left ignored. (A boat suspended in a tree in an early scene suggests a world already in ecological turmoil.)

But Zilbalodis seems careful not to lay any message on thick, and the fact that this natural disaster is never explained chimes with the innocence and ignorance of his furry heroes. This is ultimately a film about collaboration and community, and the collaboration between the talented artists behind it is about as good an example as there has ever been of the power of animation. If you care about creatures without a single word of dialogue being spoken, they’ve done their job. And then some.