We live with two black cats, one male and one female. I am fascinated by how the male, Sebastian, regards anything which opens and closes a tray to play a media disc. The blu-ray player is especially suspect, and we have come to think of it as his frenemy. To the best we can tell, he cannot understand a button on a remote being pressed corresponding to the actions of ejecting and ingesting the tray, the cause being completely separate from the effect. I’ll admit I try to conceal the remote when I use it, as I don’t want to him to make that connection and possibly shatter the illusion. It is good for life to have some mysteries. 2024 animated feature Flow gives the audience a lot to chew on, and I like to think it will retain, for me, some of its mysteries for a long time.
The plot is deceptively simple: a group of animals which would not normally associate with each other survive a flood by riding in a boat. The first one to accidentally grasp the importance of the rudder is a black cat who is the real star of the picture. Soon, the others learn by observing her and several of them will learn how to control the craft, or at least understand the importance of that navigational device.
As anybody reading this likely already knows, this Latvian film shocked the movie industry by winning this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature Film. Even without having seen its competition for those awards, I can tell the accolades are well-deserved. I also doubt I can say anything about this which hasn’t appeared in a few, or even a great many, reviews. I don’t know, as I intentionally avoided reviews of this film, knowing I would see it someday.
Because of that, I also don’t know what has been the acceptable extent of plot revelations established by other essays on the picture. In general, I will try not to reveal anything substantial enough that I believe such foreknowledge would reduce enjoyment of the movie, if you choose to see it. For fellow animal lovers worried about the fate of the cast before braving a viewing, that information is readily available through a quick Internet search. I can’t blame you if you did that, because I did so myself. I won’t say here what those outcomes will be, but I simply wanted to know what I was getting into.
As concerns the plot, it is difficult to say exactly what it is. Like much of the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it often feels simple and complex at the same time. Also similar to his writings, there will be moments which are fairly grounded in our reality, but which scan like metaphors. At other times, we will witness things that are deliberately mystical.
Superficially, the action entirely centers around that group of animals in a boat as waters quickly rise to threaten seemingly the entire world. Animals on a boat in a flood—yeah, that’s a pretty easy Sunday School analogy there. But I only thought about that after the fact, and so many wondrous moments big and small transpire over the runtime that this only crossed my mind as I was writing this.
The world this takes place in is like Earth, but I don’t think it is our planet. Although capybaras and lemurs exist in real life, I don’t think they are normally within miles of each other without being a zoo. There are also extremely tall birds in this that are like cockatoos crossbred with herons, but the size of ostriches. I don’t know if such a bird exists in our world, and I honestly don’t care. One creature that I know doesn’t exist is a whale of uncertain nature which is like a slightly Lovecraftian spin on a sperm whale. We don’t see this creature much, though it factors in a couple of critical scenes, so I’m going to call it the deus ex alien whale.
Our introduction is the world is through the eyes of the cat, and she lives in a house where there are various statues apparently modeled on her around the yard. She enters and exits the house through a broken window on the second story. Just from that broken window, we know nobody lives there anymore. For that matter, there are no human figures in this, and the only vestiges there ever were any are what they left behind.
Some evidence mankind once existed are the houses and other structures they once constructed. There are a great many sculptures, not just those of the cat, but also a giant one of a man desperately reach upward. We only briefly see it, before it is submerged by quickly rising water, as if a giant is drowning.
There is also an entire city left behind, though that looked to be ancient and possibly already a ruin before the flooding. That environment looked like nothing less to me than the kind of thing normally found in an open world game. Come to think of it, a great many elements of the movie reminded me of computer games. For example, one of the first unusual images in the runtime is a boat up in a tree. Then, when the flood suddenly happens, that boat suddenly fulfills its purpose. Another boat will have a mirror on the floor of it and, as soon as we see it, we know it will be used for a purpose we don’t know yet.
As I mentioned earlier, an odd group of animals will learn how to steer a boat, something I doubt members of any of these species would figure out on their own but which I chose to believe within the world of this film. They will also learn about such concepts as sharing, which is the kind of decency which should be fundamental to human behavior, but which seems to be falling out of favor with our own species.
There is one key moment in the runtime which feels like the single most important scene, though I am at a loss to say exactly what I think transpired. It is definitely the development which most defies strict interpretation. To the best I can tell, a character will die, but they will be accepting of this. Another character will try to follow but cannot. This touched me so deeply that I find it difficult to write about this even now. I doubt anybody else would make this association, but I can’t help but recall the songs “Box of Rain” and “Ripple” from the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, two songs I always assumed to be at least partly about death, and which leave me with that same bittersweet twinge that I felt from this scene. Perhaps I largely have in mind a couplet from the latter, where that journey one takes is the one they must take alone.
I didn’t detect much commentary on human behavior, bar an obsession the lemurs have with physical possessions. With a focus on material goods, the one on the main boat (there will be others) is the least likeable character among the bunch. Still, there was a moment which got a laugh from me, when it finds what must be the most amazing thing it has ever seen. It is a glass buoy, and I challenge anybody seeing the way the lemur seizes it to not think of Gollum saying, “My preshusssss…”
A different creature on the boat gets the most laughs and that is the capybara, which can and will fall asleep immediately and hard and anytime it damn well pleases.
The golden retriever is also very likeable, which is no surprise. It especially wants to be friends with the cat, though the latter is confused by dog behavior. As a regular practitioner of yoga, I was amused by a bit where the cat stretches in what is called downward-dog pose, and the retriever does the same thing alongside her. This irritates the cat, who stomps off with a bemused expression.
The great many subtleties in the animation of the cat is where the movie truly shines. Felines have long been an inspiration to animators and have been represented in art overall better than any other creature. Still, something undefinable about cats is captured here more accurately than I have seen before. This cat feels astonishingly real, and the moments when she is terrified were deeply uncomfortable for me. But that is good, as that means I am invested in the story and in the well-being of this character.
That the animation is all CGI is astonishing enough, but what truly shocked me is Flow was done entirely in Blender. I used to work in that and have been preaching the merits of this open-source 3D modelling software for nearly two decades now. I will never stop being amazed that the best software of its kind I have worked in was distributed for free and maintained by a worldwide network of volunteers. That is a good match for the material here, where a disparate group learns to work together and to value collaboration over selfishness and cooperation over individual possessions. In a world increasingly driven by hyper-capitalism and a decreasing interest in helping your fellow human, these are lessons many today need to learn.
Dir: Gints Zilbalodis
Watched on Fandango at Home