It’s not unfair to say that Flow – the second feature from Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis – feels like an extremely long cut scene from a PS4 game. The CG is undoubtedly a little lo-res and behind the times, the camera moves in a busy, jerky fashion, like a player trying to grasp the controls for the first time, and some of the physics seems a little off. But it’s mostly because you’ll feel an overwhelming urge to wander through this beautiful, pastoral world, to pet the cat and throw a stick for the dog as the waters rise.
Catastrophe of some kind has struck, and whether it is manmade or natural in origin is impossible to say. It’s also irrelevant to the nameless black cat that is forced from its home by rising tides that have flooded the forest. There are humans somewhere, and they love or maybe worship all things feline, as shown by the cottage filled with cat carvings, and the giant statue of a cat on which the kitty seeks brief shelter from the flood. Or maybe they aren’t humans. After all, whatever the great sea beast is that suddenly swims over what were once valleys and mountains, it’s not of our Earth, but of a world through which this displaced cat must navigate in a wordless quest for moment-to-moment survival.
Flow follows the simplest of animal narratives: the quest for home. After all, if it worked for The Incredible Journey, it can work here. Once the flood has settled and covered the land, the nameless cat finds himself on a drifting boat with strange shipmates whose personalities bring iconic power: a haughty secretary bird, a boisterous golden retriever, a relaxed capybara, and a self-obsessed lemur who loves shiny things. All they can do is drift through a drowned world as animals who have come together.
Zilbalodis has taken us on such an odyssey before. His debut feature, 2019’s Away, was a more mystical tale of a boy who rescues an orphaned bird and must travel across a mysterious forest. That was an infinitely smaller production, effectively a one-man production with Zilbalodis taking every crew position except accountant. Here the scale and complexity of the production, the narrative, and the world is much bigger – as are the visuals, since Away looked (in the best way imaginable) like it was made on a Nintendo GameCube. The animals charm us as they navigate a new ocean of wonder that is beyond their comprehension and beyond their ability to fix. There’s just here and now, and each other, and right and wrong choices.
But that’s the point. Maybe the reason Flow feels like a video game is because its precursors are classic, immersive, gentle, and exploratory video games like Myst or Outer Wilds or – more recently – the similarly feline-themed Stray. Zilbalodis isn’t trying to emulate Pixar or DreamWorks, eschewing anthropomorphic hijinks for something that is both more identifiable yet strange. It’s almost the film that the early, dialogue-free trailers for The Wild Robot promised, where being free from the burden of human words brings it closer to the heart. When the animals behave in human-like behavior, as when the secretary bird seemingly steers the boat or the cat goes fishing to feed its crewmates, Zilbalodis leaves a certain ambiguity in place – that maybe it’s all in the audience’s head, and we want to see ourselves in the animals. But in the subtle subtext of having a solitary creature like a cat find companionship in a boat full of animals who have lost their pack, their flock, or their herd, we will find a tender story about knowing where we are meant to be.
This article appears in December 6 • 2024.