From director Gints Zilbalodis comes Flow, an animated tale following a cat and the animals it meets as it tries to survive a flash flood. It is an emotional and mysterious journey that demonstrates how to write a story without words.
Flow follows Cat, a small black cat that lives life alone. With no humans around, Cat spends most of his life avoiding other animals, watching his reflection in water, and sleeping. His life is thrown into turmoil when a great flood hits the jungle where he lives, and he’s forced to befriend many other animals to survive.
The camera follows Cat around for the most part, but often pans away to show what is happening around Cat. These diversions can be lengthy sequences but eventually come back to Cat to show how what is happening around him affects him.
The way the camera moves gives a feeling of a narrative video game, where we follow a character around, only diverting to see things that affect that character. I would be thinking of games I’d played recently (such as Ryse or ABZÛ), as the camera moves in a similar way.
In video games it’s natural for the camera to follow the protagonist the whole time, but also veering off and focusing on goals or story elements, much the same way it does here. It keeps the flow immersive while also ensuring the viewer doesn’t miss anything important.
Unlike most games, Flow is about animals and has no dialogue in the traditional sense. The animals communicate with each other, but each with their own behaviours and sounds. Pet owners will find Cat and the dogs easier to understand, but the film does a great job of showing us what matters to these characters.
The film never stops the characters from behaving like the animals they are. They are anthropomorphised1 a little, but the direction and animation does a great job of making the various animals feel like animals of different species. This leads to some interesting interactions, as it is more than just language that hinders their communication, but also their instincts and behaviours.
The film is on rails, constantly moving from one place to the next as the animals make their way across the flooded jungle. There are pauses and slower moments, but the film keeps you engaged and invested in the fate of the animals.
The animals voices are recordings of their real-life counterparts, with the exception of Capybara who was voiced by a baby camel. The only “dialogue” are the sounds the animals make, but with these sounds and their animated behaviours, even those unfamiliar with cats and dogs will understand what each of the characters mean.
The film’s message is interpretive, but for me it became a movie about strength through diversity. The animals are thrust into a situation where they have to trust each other and rely on each other through their individual strengths. And they form a bond which lasts when they come out the other side.
The film is short at only 1 hour and 20 minutes, but it still leaves the viewer satisfied. With such a short and simple story, it’s hard to find fault, though there are some areas that might leave viewers disappointed.
There are elements of the film that are never fully explained, leaving you with questions at the end. Boats in the trees leave you wondering if this is the first flood, the lack of humans makes you wonder where they are and if they are still alive, the Leviathan appears, but we never learn its motivation. While this might frustrate some, the mystery is a part of the setting, and these answers aren’t important to the story we are being told.
The animals aren’t entirely realistic. Some exhibit slightly human-like behaviors, and the species don’t all originate from the same regions of the world. This is a minor criticism, as this is still a human story meant for human people, so some liberties will need to be taken.
This film brought me back to the first time I read Wind in the Willows, to a group of animals that just end up spending time together through circumstance. Unlike the book, however, the animated behaviours of the creatures in Flow show their conflicts, their camaraderie, and how their closeness grows without a single word spoken.
It is a beautiful story that will inspire wonder in all who watch it.
- Made to feel human. ↩︎
