Flow is a Latvian-animated film that begins like The Wild Robot, flexing the water simulations and reflection capabilities. The story follows a black cat who loves their home in this beautiful post-human civilization world. However, a mysterious flood forces the black cat out of their home and assembles a motley crew of other animals to escape the rising tides. The black cat befriends a capybara with a boat, who picks up some other strays along the journey of survival. To make matters more meaningful for these curious animals, they get to be themselves on-screen—no dialogue, just raw primal sounds.
No dialogue in a film is always refreshing, but it can be a hit-or-miss based on the content and storytelling. Flow used this technique to allow the audience to go on an adventure with these animals in a pseudo-natural state, not the full National Geographic experience. What I found myself doing throughout the film was filling in the dialogue for the animals because the animation did a great job detailing the emotions of the characters. Not that paying voice actors is a bad thing, but sometimes seeing the art of animation speak for itself is symbolic at a different level.
A huge shoutout goes out to the director, writer, composer, and producer of Flow, Gints Zilbalodis—yes, he does a lot for this film. His ability to capture certain beautiful scenes and tell a surreal story was captivating. The theme of how animals will always fight or find a way to survive is prevalent in this film and shows how kind they can be together too. The overall animation was reminiscent of many indie video games that utilize the latest Unreal Engine technology. The water in Flow had similar shaders to that when Valheim got its first few updates.
“The overall vibe of Flow was that it felt like a theatrical gameplay trailer for the video game Stray, but with fewer human elements.”
Zilbalodis understands colouring extraordinarily well to pull off this scale of animation. Speaking on scales in Flow, Zilbalodis also scales the flood in many clever ways—mostly using environmental structures. There were various sizes of cat structures at the beginning of the film that helped scale the initial water level. One of the cat structures was almost like a whole rock mountain, so this raised the shock value. The speed of the render of the water rising was ridiculously fast, leaving me to wonder if Zilbalodis intended this superfast rate of water flow.
Flow had a lot of symbolism and themes, though unclear at times. This was my biggest gripe with the film; the sacrificial scene was a little abstract and left a lot to interpret. It made sense at face value, but it never set up how the sacrificed character would know their sacrifice would work. When Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow sacrifices herself in Avengers: Endgame, she knows her sacrifice will get Clint and the Avengers the Soul Stone. Some interpretations could be reined in a little tighter.
“The heart of Flow was building the relationships and personalities of the various animals. “
The overall vibe of Flow was that it felt like a theatrical gameplay trailer for the video game Stray, but with fewer human elements. The great part of this film is the lack of humans, and allowing the animals to be themselves. The heart of Flow was building the relationships and personalities of the various animals. Some of them were more selfish or self-serving than others—but very on-brand for their typical behaviours in real life.
There was not a single frame of human language written throughout the film—except for the title crawl and credits, of course. However, the things these animals use and see are remnants of human civilization—adding some mystery to how this flood affected humanity. The ship they all travel on is a mystery on its own. The fact that the capybara was on it first indicated that it may have come from very far since capybaras are native to South American countries and lemurs are native to Madagascar. Unless some of these regional animals were from a zoo.
Everything in Flow is eye-candy, from the monolithic structures to the vibrant natural landscapes. The relationships of the animals provide zounds of emotional depth without a single word, but through emoting and doing certain actions. This was 84 minutes of nonstop action and emotions that will have you creating dialogue in your head or out loud!
