Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)

Cat and friends

Forget The Wild Robot or Inside Out 2; the animated film of the year has to be Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis' Flow, an eighty-five minute feature notable for what it doesn't have as for what it does. No anthropomorphic animals-- these creatures don't quip or sass back, only express what sounds can be expected of them in the natural world; no strong narrative, mainly the random events that can occur to cat in its attempts to survive a flooded world; and no gag-a-minute pacing, the standard-issue sop Pixar or Disney throws its kiddie audiences to keep their presumably ADHD buttocks glued to their seats. 

To sum up: the film doesn't insult our intelligence. The animals act mostly like animals (with maybe a few stretches here and there), and the story follows accordingly, unfolding as quickly (or slowly) as convincingly necessary to sell us the idea that yes these are animals acting as animals and yes under the right circumstances they would act this way when thrown together in a sailboat. 

As for the 'circumstances' it's Zilbalodis' conceit that we don't know what happens and we're not likely to find out. No one onscreen can talk and if they could they probably wouldn't know why the world is suddenly without humans-- the cat, a tiny black kitten with huge topaz eyes, sleeps on a made bed, in a house with a cracked window and floors that don't look as if they'd been swept for a while. It's as if all humans in the world had suddenly stepped out as one about a week ago and haven't been back since.   

Then the flood, and why the flood isn't clear. Climate change would melt the polar ice and raise sea levels, but that's a process that takes years, not a single oncoming wave. A storm surge is sudden and powerful but the weather's fine; so is a burst dam, but the chilling way the water levels rise, not just in the cat's vicinity but everywhere, the water lapping insistently at one's toes, going past the ankles if you stand in one place long enough... none of the way the water behaves or any of the details involving human disappearance makes immediate consistent sense, which actually lends an air of ominous mystery to said 'circumstances'-- something happened all right, but damned if we know or can guess just what. 

Equally intriguing are the traces of civilization: the made bed, the unfinished cat statue on a work table (with wood shaving scattered everywhere), the cat statues all over the front yard and the giant one atop a hill... all that and the massive arm stretching up high overhead while the sailboat glides underneath-- yes we're gone but apparently we've left a mark that'll last a while yet. This desolation recalls the disaster novels of JG Ballard, the way the ruins he describes so lyrically in his pages speak louder to us than the survivors' actual predicament. 

Same with the characters, animals, what-have-you. The cat and its friends (a capybara, a Labrador Retriever, a lemur, and a secretary bird) don't saddle us with cutesy dialogue but don't exactly act strictly the way animals do, more like something in-between, and it's interesting how Zilbalodis (and his co-writer Matiss Kaza) work out their various personalities. The cat itself is... a cat, a charismatic charmer able to mew piteously and growl fiercely on cue; he's standoffish especially with creatures that are too forward or sudden with their affections (but that's pretty much all cats). The retriever's the friendliest, not too bright; the lemur is single-mindedly possessive about trinkets, but not above looking up to lend a hand; the capybara is chronically lethargic but whip-smart and arguably the wisest of the bunch-- save for the secretary bird, who seems to have a touch of the divine, or the supernatural, or at least an unusual level of intelligence about him. Between the bird and the whale (What is that? It looks like a cross between a humpback and an Ichthyosaur, with maybe extra fins attached) the two seem to have some kind of unspoken affinity or connection with the powers responsible for creating this world, and if one were to insist on answers I'd check them out first. I doubt if the lemur knows anything. 

Zilbalodis immerses us in this unknown unknowable world and we drink deep of its crystalline waters (Another mystery: how can flooding be so clear?) and unnerving silences and the ruins of faintly Mayan faintly Cambodian structures standing to either side. We eventually come to know this little band of disparate brothers and we root for them to get out of one desperate scrape after another. We watch and wonder and on occasion mourn for something lost-- not so much ourselves as for the occasional creature who fails to keep up with changing circumstances, which feel as merciless and implacable as the impassive stone towers that loom in the horizon, tantalizingly close, forever unreachable. We're given no guidelines, no explanation as to how to regard this world or its creatures, no expectation of a beginning or end to the rise and fall of water; we know as much as the poor cat and his friends, but still manage to form impressions, theories, even sympathies for those we follow. And the film ends, and we have to shake our heads to clear the images that fill our heads-- was that really only eighty-five minutes? Was that really just an animated film, not some kind of VR experience? You might want to take a moment to adjust to the so-called real world, and can't be blamed if you think to yourself that perhaps this world, at least for the few minutes you sit there recovering, feels just a touch less vivid, a touch more humdrum than usual.