Among the Golden Globe Award nominees announced on Monday was a Latvian animated film that doesn’t feature a single human character or word of dialogue. The National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle have already named Flow the best animated feature of the year, over such heavy hitters as Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot. Could this award season see the triumph of an underdog — or, to be more precise, an undercat? Catch Flow at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
The deal
A lean black cat examines itself in a pool of water. Nearby stands a house surrounded by monumental cat sculptures. Inside the house are a desk bearing an unfinished drawing and a bed where Cat still curls up to sleep. But whoever made the drawing and the sculptures is gone.
Cat’s world has changed before — witness the rowboat stranded high in a tree — and now it’s changing again. A stampede of deer heralds a great wave that turns the forest to an ocean. Cat’s house vanishes. Marooned amid rising waters, Cat makes a desperate choice to leap into a drifting sailboat that already holds an impervious capybara.
Soon other animals join Cat and the capybara — a friendly golden retriever separated from its pack, an imperious secretary bird shunned by its flock and a ring-tailed lemur obsessed with a shiny hand mirror. Together they must figure out how to survive.
Will you like it?
Flow is a movie for people who are fascinated by the idea of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us or the TV show “Life After People” but not eager to dwell on the (literally) dog-eat-dog reality of what would happen if humanity just disappeared. Cowriter-director Gints Zilbalodis offers a marginally gentler, PG-rated post-collapse scenario, in which animals menace but rarely eat each other on-screen. (An exception is made for the fish that fall prey to Cat — an obligate carnivore, after all.) The film offers all the elegiac beauty of exploring deserted cities with none of the nightmarish horror of, say, The Road.
So yes, Flow could have been darker, but make no mistake — sensitive animal lovers of all ages will tear up. This isn’t apocalypse lite. While the worst consequences of the disaster happen out of frame, we’re given enough information to intuit them, and Cat’s peril is palpable. If I’d seen this as a child, certain scenes, as sublime as they’re terrifying, would have been seared into my memory like Watership Down.
Flow is all the more powerful because it avoids anthropomorphism to a degree rare in animation. While they aren’t completely free of our human projections — how could they be? — Zilbalodis’ computer-animated animals mostly act like animals. Cat’s vocalizations were recorded in the wild (i.e., a crew member’s home). Every pounce, shiver and ear flick is intimately observed, communicating our protagonist’s state of mind to anyone versed in feline body language.
The animal characters’ design offers the comfort of classic kids’ book illustrations — realistic, but not to a photographic degree. By contrast, the landscapes of Flow are painterly, wild and impressionistic. We follow Cat on a long chase through the undergrowth of a lush forest or soaring through the air, caught in the giant bird’s claws, with a 360-degree view of the world below.
This is not a movie for those who get hung up on when, where or how. Flow has the dreamlike quality of a Great Flood fable, and the human structures we see — including many apparent temples and sacred places — are clearly representative rather than geographically realistic. The sumptuous wilderness has a touch of Thomas Cole romanticism. The many colors and textures of water are breathtaking, and a surfacing whale has the grandeur of a prehistoric monster.
It’s both liberating and unsettling to watch the end of the world through an animal’s eyes. We can feel all the grief without focusing on our own role in causing the disaster. But we also feel our insignificance. Driven by anxiety and the will to survive, Cat lives in the present with no ability to speak or self-reflect, to fear the future or reminisce fondly about the past. Admiring the whimsical architecture of an abandoned city, we wonder, How did this happen? Where did everyone go? And we know these are questions that vanished when humanity did, questions for which Cat will never have words.
Life goes on without us, though. Cat dreams of past terrors; Cat ventures out of its solitude to make friends. In one enigmatic scene, Cat even experiences something that could only be called transcendence. Flow quietly brings us around to a deeper awareness of the things animals might have to teach us. When Cat finally finds a reason to purr, the moment has a majestic sadness that sums up what’s so special about this film.
If you like this, try…
Away (2019; fuboTV, Prime Video, Roku Channel, Tubi): Zilbalodis’ debut animated feature, also silent and a festival award winner, features a boy and a bird exploring a monster-haunted island.
Memoir of a Snail (2024; rentable): To get up to date on the award nominees for animation that weren’t made by Disney, Pixar or DreamWorks, watch Australian director Adam Elliot’s alternately sad and funny stop-motion tale of a reclusive young woman. I reviewed it last week.
The Boy and the Heron (2023; Max, rentable): Last year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar went to Hayao Miyazaki’s fantasy with real-world autobiographical elements, set during World War II. Like Flow, it features bird figures laden with symbolism and gorgeous landscapes that feel real enough to step inside.
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This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2024.
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