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.
Gints Zilbalodis’ animated feature Flow is a poignant, picturesque movie. Its delightful visuals are impressive in themselves, but as an allegory for the importance of community against a backdrop of disaster, it’s something special. Like the water the film is named after, it is often scary and unrelenting, but also soothing and reflective.
The film is set in an unspecified future, one where the world has been devastated by massive floods and mercurial tides. The protagonist is an unnamed black cat who tries to adapt to this new world but struggles to do so. The film opens with the cat gazing at their reflection in a puddle, evoking loneliness. This is reinforced when the cat takes 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 renders 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 an unknown destination, the group adapts to each other, just as they have to adapt to the world around them.
Like 2023’s phenomenal Robot Dreams, this animated film contains no dialogue, with the sounds mainly coming from the surrounding environment and the occasional meow or bark. Without dialogue, the story’s emotional weight comes from the tone of the animal noises and the technical choices behind the visual language. For example, the film uses the tide line to signal danger, with overhead shots showing statues and landscapes gradually submerging as the water rises. Occasionally, the waterline moves up through the shot to show the tide’s speed, creating terror as the cat and other animals struggle to stay afloat, their meows and other vocalisations nonverbal but still conveying everything 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 seemingly fantastical setting starts to look closer and closer to a potential reality.
Although the film is set presumably after climate change has fully taken effect, its story can be read as thematically offering an answer to how to combat it. The cat has a distinctive arc: they begin the picture lonely and mistrustful. They sleep in the abandoned house until they can no longer, and swipe or hiss at any animals that come near. Yet, as they are forced to share a mode of survival with all sorts of other creatures, the cat becomes 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 it all together is idiosyncratic animation that gives Flow a dazzling, atmospheric glow. While the animals themselves have a rough, video game cutscene quality that keeps them from feeling as photorealistic as their surroundings, the expressions animated onto them 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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