#Gurwal Coïc-Gallas

[dweemeister]

NOTE: Thanks goes to the 2024 Animation is Film Festival in Los Angeles for their screening of Flow this last October.

Flow (2024, Latvia/Belgium/France)

In modern animated movies, audiences expect that any animals that show up to be as sassy as the big-name actor that invariably portrays them. The idea of depicting animals in de-anthropomorphized ways or having them express only animalistic wants and needs have, for decades, been out of fashion (if they ever were). To portray animals in nature, as they are or might be, is not a concern to the major American animation studios. But it is the concern in Gints Zilbalodis’ feature film, Flow (Straume in the original Latvian). Produced by a patchwork of Latvian, Belgian, French, and other studios across the European Union, this is Zilbalodis’ second feature, after Away (2019). Animation in Europe, with Comcast-owned Illumination (France) and maybe Aardman (United Kingdom) as exceptions, remains a thoroughly unprofitable and infeasible venture without the collaboration of partner studios across the continent and subsidies from various E.U. governments.

Through the animals found in Flow – and especially the black cat via whom we experience the film’s narrative – Zilbalodis relates to the audience how difficult and, ultimately, rewarding it can be in learning how to trust and work with others. That trust, in turn, enriches one’s own life. The animals of Flow embody these themes while remaining simply animals. Other the occasional anthropomorphized behavior, the cat and their companions (no names, no genders) are what you expect them to be. There is refreshingly zero dialogue in Flow (excitedly, that makes it two fantastic no-dialogue animated films for me this year), allowing for a rare instance in which a 2020s film can easily cut across geographic, linguistic, and age barriers. Speaking of age barriers, Flow dissolves any notion that animation is simply a children’s medium. This is a film that a viewer of any age can enjoy; children and adults will both take something very different away from one of the most remarkable animated features of the year.

Nature has reclaimed the ruined vestiges of humanity – present nowhere in a waterlogged world. On a forested hilltop in a wooden cottage lives a black cat, surrounded by wooden carvings of cats and an enormous statue of a cat that looms over the residence. The cat has just had a testy exchange with several dogs and is resting one evening when they notice that the water is rising dangerously fast. Sprinting to the largest cat statue, the cat notices that water is fast consuming almost all of the land as far as their eyes can see. In a stroke of good fortune, the cat hops onto a passing boat just as the statue becomes completely engulfed in water. Already sailing this new high sea is a well-mannered capybara, who we find out has already learned how to steer the boat. On this journey of survival, the cat and capybara will pick up other passengers: a towering secretary bird, a kleptomaniac lemur, and a Labrador Retriever who always wants to play, no matter the situation. Our central quintet will encounter other animals along their travels: those who wish to be left alone, others who might want to join them on this journey without destination, and others who help in their own way.

Key to immersing oneself into Flow’s measured pace is to not look for answers where the film has none. When Flow made its North American West Coast premiere at the Animation is Film Festival in Los Angeles, Zilbalodis claimed he “did not care to explain” the exact reasons for humanity’s complete absence from Earth. Without exposition, Flow is, at a basic level, a depiction of animals contending with the whims of nature. Beyond this, the film is ripe for interpretation – one could even argue that the narrative of Flow itself exists only for its own sake. There are several hints that the dramatic water level rises have been occurring for some time, and only now is it reaching the elevation where it concerns the cat. The closing minutes of Flow leave the fates of each character ambiguous. Credit to Zilbalodis and co-screenwriter and co-producer Matiss Kaza for trusting the audience’s intelligence here.

Between those moments, each of the animals – the cat, the capybara, the secretary bird, the lemur, the Labrador Retriever – all grow, to different extents, to cast aside their selfishness and to assist the others in the boat. As long as they travel together, their lives are inextricably tied to that of the group. Because the cat is the film’s main character, the cat’s personal growth is most apparent. Aloof early on, implicitly used to some sort of indulgent lifestyle, and clearly annoyed by the nonsense of the lemur and the Labrador Retriever, the cat learns to fend for themself, to not depend on the odd bit of charity from the capybara or the secretary bird for food. In a colorful montage where the cat teaches themself to hunt while swimming, it initially appears that the cat will catch the fish just for one. Who would blame the cat after eating only a few bananas on this voyage? Instead, in respect to the secretary bird – who alternates with the capybara in steering the boat and who defended the cat earlier in the film from harm – the cat shares some of the aquatic bounty with them, as well as the Labrador Retriever.

There are perilous scenes that more dramatically depict the growth of each of our central quintet. In the sum of Flow’s dramatic and its quotidian moments, all of the animals – separated from others of their own species who might better understand them, with only a few feet of wooden planks separating them utter desolation – embrace the things that are essential. Eventually, they set aside their pride, material desires, and perhaps their own wellbeing to ensure the safety of the others. All of this is shown through their actions, in ways that will be understandable to audiences across cultures and time. Flow is a deceptively simple film when examining it solely through its story. Its complexities appear when one understands how difficult it is for a group of different-minded individuals to come to a mutual understanding for their own survival, let alone members of different animal species.

Made for less than $4 million in 2024’s USD (for contemporary comparison, The Wild Robot cost $78 million, Inside Out 2 at $200 million), Flow contains animation that belies its fractional budget. Animated using the open-source tool Blender, Zilbalodis’ team had to use some shortcuts in animating. The backgrounds, lush as they appear, are not always as detailed as they seem to be. If a scene does not have the animals move into the recesses of the background, Zilbalodis and his animators choose to leave the foliage as a blur, giving an impression of depth where there is none (see: draw distances of vistas in open-world video games as a counterexample). One can even glimpse a faint brushstroke among the trees and stone columns that dot the landscape – imperfections that remain in the film intentionally. The human infrastructure – or what remains of it – that appears is similarly not as detailed as one might think at first. The architectural styles seen within make no geographic sense, ranging from vaguely Venetian to Himalayan.

The human attention and processing power of Flow’s animation instead goes into its character animation and water effects – the latter was the responsibility of exactly two animators. So too the incredible sound design by Gurwal Coïc-Gallas (2017’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, 2023’s Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds). Flow’s character animation and its animal acting is the animated marvel of this production. Zilbalodis, who had a cat himself during his secondary school years, based the cat’s behavior on that cat. In interviews, Zilbalodis has described his film as, “not… copying nature, [but] interpreting it and creating a performance.” Granted, each of the animals in Flow behaves how you might expect them to in nature. But, like its spiritual predecessors in Bambi (1942) and Watership Down (1978), Flow necessarily injects a level of anthropomorphizing. Nevertheless, Flow – even with some humanizing (especially in some of the facial expressions) of the animals – feels as shorn of anthropomorphizing as one could expect in an animated movie. Too often in major animation studio films, there is a slickness and rubbery texture to character and background animation that, after a few minutes, loses its personality. Flow, in its imperfections and attentive animal acting, might be CGI-animated, but its craft always feels human.

Like his first film Away, Gints Zilbalodis does much of the work beyond directing and cowriting. Zilbalodis is also co-producer, cinematographer, editor, art director, and co-composer (along with Rihards Zaļupe). During the production of Flow, Zilbalodis also learned, like the animals in this film, to learn how to ask for help and to be a better collaborator. Zilbalodis, who also composed the music for Away, had to call in Rihards Zaļupe because he was having difficulty in directing the emotional contours of Flow’s score. Like the score to Away, Flow’s score is largely an ambient experience, with few melodic throughlines – this is a score meant only to accompany the film, not to help in the storytelling. Zaļupe, a professional composer, brought in a full orchestra to help Zilbalodis – gifting the film rapturous cues such as “Flow Away”. Other times, such as when the animals enter the Venetian-like city, Zilbalodis and Zaļupe’s score crescendos and layers the orchestra, only for no apparent reason on-screen and within the score itself. Zilbalodis was correct in calling in a professional composer to assist him on the music, but this is a score of someone who needs to learn that a film score can be more than just textural.

Gints Zilbalodis has noted that Flow was not truly influenced by cinema or any other works of art (other than maybe the comedic timing of silent film stars like Buster Keaton). It is a film that comes almost purely from dreams, sometimes adopting the logic of dreams. Too many modern filmmakers, forgetting that cinema is principally a visual medium, over-rely on dialogue to move a story or characterizations forward. Flow is a necessary reminder that, in film, visual storytelling comes before anything else – not the dialogue, nor messaging. It is a remarkable sophomore directorial effort from Zilbalodis – one that elevates his standing beyond animation diehards. Flow is also a breathtaking statement of animation’s power, its primordial closeness to the dawn of cinema, and what one can achieve when we genuinely try to understand the plights of others.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.