Flow is screening at Belfast Film Festival on Saturday, November 9. BOOK TICKETS
Gints Zilbalodis’ animated feature Flow is a poignant, picturesque movie. Its delightful visuals are impressive in itself, but as an allegory for the importance of community against a backdrop of disaster, it really is something special. Like the water whose path the film is named after, it is often scary and unrelenting, but it is also soothing and reflective.
The film is set during an unstated time in the future, one where the world has become devastated by massive floods and mercurial tides. The protagonist is an unnamed black cat who is attempting to adapt to this new world yet struggles to do so. The film opens with the cat gazing at their reflection in a puddle, evoking a sense of loneliness. This is emphasised by the cat taking refuge in an abandoned house filled with cat sculptures and pictures. It is never confirmed, but one could believe that this used to be the cat’s owner’s place.
When a particularly bad flood comes in, rendering the house unlivable, the cat sets off to find a new settlement. Evading high tides, a pack of wild dogs, and a terrifying flock of cranes, among others, the cat eventually finds itself sharing an adrift boat with other wild animals, namely a capybara, a lemur, and a labrador who was part of the dog pack hunting the cat. As the boat drifts to a destination unknown to the animals, the group find themselves adapting to each other just as they have had to adapt to the world around them.
Like 2023’s phenomenal Robot Dreams, this animated film contains no dialogue, with the sounds mainly being that of the surrounding environment and the occasional meow or bark. With no dialogue to rely on, the emotional gravity of the story is conveyed through the tone of the animal noises and the technical choices behind the visual language. For example, the film uses the waterline of the tides as a way of indicating danger, with overhead shots depicting statues and landscapes gradually being submerged as the water rises. Occasionally, the waterline will move up through the shot to showcase the rapidness of this growing tide, generating a sense of terror as the cat and other animals struggle to stay afloat, their meows or vocalisations nonverbal but still conveying everything that’s going through their minds.
It’s a remarkable use of the audiovisual medium to generate empathy for animals who are simply trying to survive in a rapidly changing environment. Yet this choice is doubly clever in its subtextual elements. While one can draw Noah’s Ark parallels in this story – the huge floods and the boat of animals, for starters – the film seems more ubiquitous as a response to the contemporary climate emergency. Even though there are human settlements like houses and cities, and some animals act in such a manner that would suggest previous domesticity – in the labrador’s case requesting that a spherical object be thrown so that they can catch it – there isn’t a human in sight anywhere in the film. One can see the setting as the aftermath of disasters brought on by man-made climate change, only with the humans having either died out or abandoned the animals to fend for themselves. One considers the horrendous flooding we’ve seen in places like Florida, England and, more recently, Spain and this seeming fantasy setting starts to look closer and closer to a potential reality.
Although the film is set presumably after climate change has fully taken effect, one can see its story as thematically providing an answer to how to combat it. The cat has a distinctive arc in which they begin the picture lonely and mistrustful. They sleep in the abandoned house until they no longer can, and swipe or hiss at any animals that come near them. Yet, as they are forced into sharing a mode of survival with all sorts of other creatures, the cat finds themselves becoming more open, finding kindred spirits in these animals. In showing how these animals forgo their initial survival instincts and find common ground, the film argues that the way to fight climate change is to stop pitting ourselves against each other and work together for a common goal. Flow works beautifully as a heartfelt animation about a cat finding a new family. But as a call to solidarity and community in the face of horrendous destruction, it packs a mighty, timely punch.
Bringing all of this together is idiosyncratic animation that gives Flow a dazzling, atmospheric glow. While the rendering of the animals themselves has a rough, video game cutscene quality, making them not as photorealistic as their surroundings, the expressions animated onto the animals fill them with life. Small touches such as the speed at which the cat blinks and the ways that the animals interact with the setting – such as the cat rubbing against statues to claim them as their own or the capybara swimming in circles to catch fish – give this movie a true to life feel that breathes so much personality into these creatures. That it achieves so much without a single line of dialogue makes its resonance all the more impactful.
Flow is a film of deceptive power. It is gorgeously crafted with bright animation and a quietly epic score, which Zilbalodis also helped to orchestrate, but it serves as so much more than just a visual treat. As a reminder of the urgency of climate change and the tools needed to combat it – namely, the need for everyone to work together to ensure survival – it proves itself a brilliant and destabilising feature. Here’s hoping we can one day look back on this as a beautiful work of fiction instead of a deadly reminder of what we could bring upon ourselves.
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