Flow review – cat’s entertainment

If there is a cat in your ani­mat­ed film, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom dic­tates that it must be wise­crack­ing, aloof, and prefer­ably voiced by a B‑list celebri­ty. Even the adorable mog­gies at the heart of many Stu­dio Ghi­b­li prop­er­ties can’t escape the Cat­ti­tude Curse that has long plagued our feline friends in film – but there’s a dis­rup­tor in our midst. In his sec­ond fea­ture film, which took five and a half years to make using open source soft­ware Blender, Gints Zil­balodis cen­ters a small grey cat who doesn’t utter a sin­gle word. Nei­ther do his crew mates (a capy­bara, a dog, a sec­re­tary­bird and a ring-tailed lemur) on the small boat they find them­selves trav­el­ling in after a great flood turns the land into an ocean. Instead the cat meows, the dog barks, the bird squawks and the lemur chit­ters (the capy­bara is actu­al­ly voiced by a baby camel as Zil­balodis wor­ried audi­ences would find actu­al capy­bara sounds off­putting) as their quin­tet attempts to nav­i­gate a brave new world.

Great care and atten­tion has been devot­ed to the move­ment and behav­iour of the ani­mal char­ac­ters, who behave as their real-world coun­ter­parts do in nature doc­u­men­taries rather than in con­ven­tion­al ani­mat­ed films. A nar­row-eyed glance from the cat or an enthu­si­as­tic bounce from the dog is endear­ing and famil­iar, and Zil­balodis proves that we don’t need films to anthro­po­mor­phise ani­mals in order to quick­ly devel­op a bond with them; it’s human nature to recog­nise their per­son­al­i­ties. This inten­tion­al lack of dia­logue allows the film’s care­ful sound design and soar­ing score (com­posed by Zil­balodis and Rihards Zaļupe) to take cen­tre stage, cre­at­ing a film that’s as much about the jour­ney as it is the destination.

Flow​’s dis­tinc­tive­ly dig­i­tal aes­thet­ic, rem­i­nis­cent of ear­ly video game graph­ics, may appear crude com­pared to the slick work of giant ani­ma­tion stu­dios, but what Zil­balodis (also serv­ing as cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er and edi­tor) is able to achieve with wide­ly acces­si­ble, free soft­ware is no less impres­sive or mov­ing. One scene, in which the plucky cat comes across an injured whale, is more heart­felt than any­thing Dis­ney have achieved in years, prov­ing bud­get and bells and whis­tles are no sub­sti­tute for keen sto­ry­telling and emo­tion­al resonance.

Despite being an obvi­ous med­i­ta­tion on the poten­tial for impend­ing cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe, the film is nev­er cloy­ing or con­de­scend­ing – instead Flow feels warm and del­i­cate, like the fur of a cat who’s been lying in a sun spot all morn­ing. There is a gen­tle­ness to its rhythms even with plen­ty of mild per­il, and the emo­tion­al beats that the film hits are dis­arm­ing­ly potent as we come to invest heav­i­ly in the sweet crew of ani­mals aboard a flim­sy wood­en ves­sel. Yet even with its life­like ani­mals, there’s an ethe­re­al qual­i­ty to Flow which is trans­fix­ing, harken­ing back to the days of Mar­tin Rosen and Don Bluth. As Dis­ney con­tin­ues to suf­fer from a bad case of sequelitis and Ghi­b­li frets over suc­ces­sion, it’s a relief inde­pen­dent ani­ma­tion proves bud­get is no bound­ary to innovation.