An animated triumph of visual storytelling that is as tender as it is bracing, “Flow” deploys animals to unspool an achingly human tale. An adventure yarn about a world in crisis as seen through the eyes of a handful of creatures struggling to survive it, the movie trusts in its non-verbal characters and the emotional currency they earn throughout the tight 86-minute runtime. Emotional and moving, the CG rendering brings every blink, shudder, and shriek to life, breathing life into small moments that consistently land with the heaviest of impacts.
The audience is introduced to the world of “Flow” via an adolescent grey cat doing regular feline stuff in a forest. Frolicking in the tall grass of the woods in between scouting missions to track food and a nearby pack of dogs, the cat seems to have a handle on its existence until a flood crashes through its home valley. Rising water levels transform even the highest peaks into puddles, leaving the cat no option but to take refuge in a small sailboat whose only occupant is a capybara.
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The pair are eventually joined by others, including a dog, lemur, and bird, each of whom reacts differently to the situation. They all want to survive, but the cat wants to do so in isolation, while the dog yearns for the community (the bird wants something halfway between each). The lemur’s base materialism (it is hoarding a basket of shiny trinkets) and the capybara’s indifference to pretty much all of them round out the group, and their growth into a genuine community serves as the backbone of “Flow.”
Director Gints Zilbalodis explored a similar non-verbal flight away from primal forces in his previous feature, “Away.” While that laid more focus on the struggle of the individual, “Flow” concerns itself with society. The cat’s journey is one of not just discovery but self-realization about the importance of a found family after its initial struggle to survive merely; conversely, the dog understands life only in terms of its pack, yet comes to learn about the danger of the wrong kind of company. Zilbalodis is once again exploring the primeval scramble away from an inescapable pursuer, yet with “Flow,” he is tapping into how this crisis fosters community and earned kinship.
Although “Flow” doesn’t explain this world or the ‘why’ of what’s happening, there are enough clues scattered throughout to color in the essentials. Before the flood washes away the cat’s home, man-made sketches and statues pepper the area (along with the boat itself), pointing at some collapsed civilization preceding these events. While the animation does a magnificent job creating this tactile, lived-in world, the animal design and rendering baits the emotional hooks in this one.
The movements of all the creatures feel natural, yet so do the expressions during the crucial moments of the narrative: threading the needle between the genuine and the anthropomorphic. A worried look that the dog gives when he realizes his old pack is more trouble than they are worth speaks volumes but is entirely familiar to anyone with a labrador or retriever and doesn’t stretch the imagination all that much. Each creature has similar moments and is a credit to the work Zilbalodis, and his animation team has done to bring all of this to life without a single word of dialogue.
There is much to commend on the back end of “Flow” as well, including the sound design of the animals and the world around them. The movie’s world is textured with the trilling of insects and the rustle of trees, which add more than depth to the story but a true sense of place for all of this. The score by Zilbalodis and Rihards Zaļupe is a crucial component of the narrative as well and manages to inform the story without taking it over at any point.
A chronicle of a group of animals, sure, but “Flow” is really about the best aspects of humanity as seen through the lens of these creatures. How living things learn to trust, share, and protect the weakest among them represents the best ideas of life on this planet, and it is what Zilbalodis is interested in here. Even if humanity sometimes forgets or outright disregards this, “Flow” supposes that the gentler species populating the fringes still remember. It’s a timely story, too, because looking around these days, they may soon be all that’s left to carry on that example. [A]
“Flow” premieres November 22 in theaters via Janus Films.
