Review: Flow

Director:  Gints Zilbalodis

One of the blessings of being a childless adult is not having to spend hours upon hours suffering through the glut of talking animal cartoons voiced wholly by sassy American actors doing a guest spot. Be it Disney, Dreamworks, Illumination or whoever, the range and tone seems generally interchangeable and equally as exhausting. Parents, I salute your patience. Appearing like a blessing, then, is Latvian multitasker Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, a completely dialogue-free tale built and rendered using 3D animation tool Blender, which has brought its native country international attention for its savvy universality. Flow is a masterclass in both behaviour observation and visual storytelling, one in which Zilbalodis’ camera fluidly keeps us close to the action.

The setting is deliberately non-specific, with architecture and animals drawn from different cultures and continents. You’re free to imagine it’s a future version of Earth or a parallel universe. It matters not. Beginning with a young, dark grey cat staring at its own reflection in a puddle, we follow this likable lil guy bounding about a verdant woodland territory, fleeing from dogs and curling up cosy at the cabin it calls home. When a cataclysmic flood strikes, our feline friend soon finds its homeland quickly submerged, and latches onto an adrift sailboat (a Mediterranean felucca) carrying a capybara.

As water levels continue to rise, this unlikely duo are joined by an enthusiastic Labrador retriever, a possessive ring-tailed lemur and, eventually, a secretarybird that’s a tad territorial about the boat’s rudder. Together they drift through ancient ruins and between vertiginous rocky outcrops, all the while working out how to exist with one another, and with the quixotic marine life beneath them.

Flow shows us how the cat and co. quickly acclimate to new surroundings, showing progressive learning, all without tipping too far toward overt anthropomorphism. The respective animals can only communicate in their natural ‘voices’ (the capybara’s noises are actually those of a baby camel, as Zilbalodis found this more audience-friendly). Demeanour is the more emphatic method of communication. Still, aside from some credulity-busting co-operative skills, this bunch evidence a wealth of research and study from the film’s creators. It’s more restrained than most David Attenborough docs.

Without prattling chatter to placate attention spans, the film’s music has more room to hold court. Co-written by Zilbalodis with Rihards Zaļupe, it’s a soulful journey in its own right, often matching the long and meandering camera takes. Coupled with the animation style, it gives Flow the feel of an indie video game that’s sprawled out into a rather dignified and winsome feature film.

Flow credits its audience with imagination, and its peppering of disparate iconographies encourage wonder. There are plentiful totemic cat statues at the start, suggestive of Egyptian deification… or simply, an artistic owner with a feline muse. The vessel the animals find themselves on is European, but the ruins they pass feel South American. Rather than seeming like a lazy hodgepodge, this mingling of influences and flavours engenders the film’s cross-continental appeal. The addition of leviathan-like ‘mutated’ whales only enhances the sense of the mythic and otherworldly. Not to mention one fantastic encounter toward the end of the picture that is heavily suggestive of some supernatural divinity. Flow doesn’t pinpoint its wheres or whys, rather inviting the viewer to daydream on them.

This extends to the narrative. With it’s seeming natural disaster tied to rapidly rising water levels, its most immediate read is as a reflection of climate change anxieties. Polar icecaps melting en masse? The repercussions of some not-too-distant tsunami? But it needn’t just be that. It’s equally suggested – by the sight of a rowboat stuck in a tree prior to this dramatic turn – that we’re in the midst of a cyclical meteorological/geographical event. The behaviour of a group of deer at top and tail of the picture together with a post-credits scene add further weight. But, importantly, nothing is set in stone for the viewer. Flow is content for its audience to reach for an explanation if it suits them or to simply go with the, well, flow.

There’s frequent peril here for cat lovers (every time our grey little hero paddled out too far from the boat I felt my anxiety levels rising), but also moments of simple, relatable delight. This puss isn’t above scampering to catch reflected sun spots, or knocking indignant objects off of ledges. The narrowing or widening of eyes, meanwhile, speaks volumes for all Zilbalodis’ creatures. The mix of domesticated and exotic animals is a cannily smart one, affording us behaviours we’ve seen before among those we’re perhaps less familiar with.

As intimated, Zilbalodis treats audiences to humorous asides, but the mood overall is more plaintive and dreamlike. Flow plays like a fable and we’re along for the ride, left to decipher the world much as an animal has to. Man’s fingerprints have touched this world, but these creatures have become its custodians. Often delightfully enigmatic, Flow and its imagery linger long after the credits have rolled, spreading out in the mind like ripples on water.