Flow (U) |Close-Up Film Review

Latvian film maker Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature film Flow is just gorgeous.  It has won armfuls of awards, most recently the BAFTA and the Academy Award for best animation and the film deserves every one of them. It is beautiful to look at with a simple but engrossing story and animal characters that are true to their real animal nature.

The central character is a cat and all the other characters are animals too.  Unlike the often cutesy characters in animation, which are given human characteristics and voiced by celebrity actors, there is no dialogue.  The characters all “speak” in their natural voices, recorded from real animals – the cat meows, the dogs bark and whine and so on.  And they all move like the animals they are.  The way the cat stretches, the enthusiasm of a dog wanting to make friends, the suspicion and shyness of the lemur.

The story set up is simple.  The seas are overflowing and the world is being flooded.  Cat first becomes aware of this when a herd of terrified deer run past him in the forest, fleeing from the tidal wave that follows them.   Cat runs to higher ground back to the cabin where perhaps he lives with his human.  Cat’s presumed owner appears to be a sculptor who loves cats.  There are statues of them in the garden and drawings of them on the desk but no sign of their creator.  There are no humans in the film. We have all disappeared. 

Cat curls up on the unmade bed and sleeps, but is soon disturbed again by the rising water.   As the cabin and the sculptures disappear into the water, Cat is rescued by a big white bird, who drops him into an open boat carrying an amiable capybara, an orange rodent, which is native to South America.   As the boat drifts on, it becomes a shelter for other refugees – a lemur intent on gathering pointless stuff, which it guards fiercely.  A friendly dog, who has become separated from a hooligan herd of refugee canines, who get onto the boat later and behave – well – like hooligans, despite Dog’s attempt to control them.

The diverse geographical origins of the animals in the boat and the occasional human created architecture they sometimes drift past gives us no clue as to where in the world we are.  It is a world now made up largely of forest and water. The only food they have is fish – Cat, initially terrified of water, learns to swim and to catch them.  

Despite having nothing in common initially, out of the need to survive, the animals come to tolerate each other and learn the benefits of co-operation in achieving that survival, without in any way losing their animal nature or  mimicking humans  Apart that is from the hooligan dogs, who, as best friend of now extinct man, stay hooligan to the end.  Taking after their former masters perhaps?  .

Flow is a beautiful piece of work, totally engrossing and original and strangely moving.  Despite its U certificate, it is a film primarily for adults, but older children, particularly those who are becoming aware of the wider world outside childhood, may well be drawn to it as well.