A true labour of love from budding auteur Gints Zilbalodis and a production team divided between his native Latvia, France, and Belgium – nominated for Best International Film and Best Animated Film at the Academy Awards – Flow tells the story of a small black cat and his animal companions who struggle to survive a million-year flood that submerges their lush home.
Animated with the open-source software Blender, this low-budget film uses the power of the computer to make a compelling case for art made by hand.
The animals inhabit a world where evidence of human craftsmanship is prominent, yet people have vanished. Although this disappearance precedes the flood, it must have happened recently.
At the beginning of the tale, we learn that the protagonist lives in the abandoned home of an artist whose wooden sculptures of domestic cats fill the front yard and whose massive stone sculpture of one, akin to a feline Mount Rushmore, looms in the distance. A sculpture is in progress in the missing person’s workshop, and a sketch for another design is on his drafting board.
When the flood comes, the cat is forced to flee, first to the top of the monolith and then, once the waters are about to swallow it up, on a sailboat that fortuitously drifts alongside the sculpture.
It turns out that another creature, an amiable capybara, has already stowed away on this boat. Eventually, the two creatures are joined by a lemur, a golden retriever the cat encountered before the flood, and an elegant raptor, the secretary bird.
As the boat drifts through this drowned world, it passes through the massive columns of a ruin, comes to rest on an island with a windmill of a more recent vintage, and then passes through a magnificent city.
Two artefacts feature prominently in the narrative: a blown-glass buoy first seen at the artist’s house and a hand mirror the lemur comes to treasure.
Although the animals are interested in the human-made world, they do not behave like people. To the extent that they communicate with each other and with the audience, it must be through their movements and pre-linguistic sounds.
This constraint sets Flow apart from the great many animated films targeted at children in which animals do have the power of speech, not to mention pre-lapsarian tales from cultures around the world.
Zilbalodis has explained in interviews that he didn’t want Flow to overexplain, preferring that audiences derive their own conclusions from the film’s visual evidence.
He also took pains to set the action far from the present day, including only artefacts and architectural details that have existed for centuries.
And by bringing domestic pets together with exotic wild animals found on different continents, he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in telling a realistic story.
The cumulative impact of these decisions is to make Flow feel somewhat like a videogame in which characters explore abandoned spaces – think Myst or Silent Hill – only without being able to control the action.
Instead, we watch the animals navigate those spaces as if someone else were playing them. The nature of the plot reinforces this perception.
Not only do the animals in the film confront an inexplicable natural disaster that threatens to destroy their world, but they also must contend with a series of smaller-scaled problems within that precarious frame.
To survive the disaster, they must learn to work together, which requires them to override their instinctual programming.
Zilbalodis has explicitly compared the cross-species collaboration in the film with the experience of making it.
After making his previous film Away almost all by himself, the director knew he would need help to realise his vision for Flow. A loner by inclination, like the little black cat that is the film’s protagonist, he had to reconcile himself with a division of labour.
The lengthy production credits that precede Flow tell a similar story.
Over the past two decades, European filmmakers have had to navigate an increasingly fractured funding landscape, in which the money for a film must be cobbled together, not only from a variety of sources within one’s country of origin, but from elsewhere on the continent. When a director hails from a nation as small as Latvia, the pieces of this budgetary mosaic are particularly far-flung.
Flow communicates a double metonymy: The wary little cat represents not only its director but also his film.
Every time the creature is in danger—after being swept away by floodwaters, when one of the large secretary birds that populate the landscape scoops it up, or when the golden retriever that befriends it is reunited with the scary-looking dogs of its improvisatory “pack”— we have an opportunity to acknowledge how precarious a low-budget European picture like this one actually is.
This helps to explain why the animals have the blocky look of computer animation from the turn of the millennium.
Considering the spectacular level of detail in the film’s backgrounds, with gorgeous images of a verdant riparian landscape at the beginning and exquisitely rendered light on the water after the flood, this blockiness feels like an aesthetic choice, but one that gives the impression of a virtue made of necessity.
In other words, by rejecting the technological perfectionism that turns so many CGI-dominated films of today into soulless slogs, Gints Zilbalodis encourages audiences to remember that human hands are still required to make post-human art.
Flow’s stylised imperfection also facilitates allegorical interpretation.
The film beautifully serves as an allegory for the virtues of cooperation, one that even a small child can understand.
But Flow’s self-reflexivity and deliberate refusal of verisimilitude also invite us to probe the story for deeper, darker implications.
Because the animals lack the power of speech, the film functions as a commentary on the approaching “post-literate” age, as traditional educational systems break down.
The prominent role played by reflections, both in the water and in the mirror that the lemur cannot stop peering into, suggests a connection between animals’ instinctual programming and the collective identities that frequently cause human beings to behave in a beastly manner.
More abstractly, Flow can be interpreted as an allegory for contemporary Europe, where small countries like Latvia struggle to survive as they drift through the ruins left behind by the impressive world-building of the modern age.
What makes Flow a truly great film is that it encourages such hermeneutic speculation without forgetting that it also needs to captivate audiences who only wish to be entertained.
Screenshot courtesy of Madman Films. All rights reserved.
