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by anna jane begley
In an era of dimly-lit Disney remakes and franchised animations, Flow crashes onto our screens like a tsunami. Following a group of unlikely animal friends on a nautical adventure after a natural disaster, the Latvian Oscar-winner may seem like your usual family-friendly fairytale, but it’s really something more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen in the past few years.
Gints Zilbalodis’ second feature (following his 2019 debut Away) takes place in a post-apocalyptic world and centres on a jet black, wide-eyed cat who seems to live in a home once owned by a feline-obsessed human. Collapsed cat statues pervade the garden, so gigantuan in size there’s something a tad AI about it, like someone put a prompt for “Ozymandias but with cats” into Chat GPT.
The wider landscape is indeed reminiscent of a video game: we move from wonderfully verdant forests to hauntingly empty Italianesque architecture that still stands grand above rising waters, like the ruins of Venice; and then to the dark, sinister underworld that all the animals have naturally gravitated towards, as though travelling to the ninth circle of hell. For what purpose, however, it’s unclear.
The £3 million film uses the free, open-source software Blender, and although it takes a while to get used to the low-budget animation style, it eventually draws you into Flow’s odyssey, accompanied by a capybara, a dog, a lemur and a secretarybird.
Zilbalodis makes the decision to omit any dialogue, paying close attention instead to the mannerisms and sounds of each creature (the sounds are in fact real animals, rather than humans cosplaying); Flow slinks around, purrs and twitches its tail; the secretarybird jerks its head from side to side in curiosity. It’s a breath of fresh air from the generic anthropomorphised characters we see from blockbuster children’s films, where the ability to franchise is prioritised over creativity (though admittedly, the grip on the animals’ realism loosens slightly near the end of the film).
Is Flow a tale of friendship, of tolerance, an ecocriticism of…something? Although it has been described as a fable, to put too much emphasis on a moral misses its largest achievement which is its kaleidoscopic beauty. It is a beautiful film, full of colours and textures and personality. If you have to take away any implicit message, it should be hope for the future of animation.
