In the modern technological age, there’s something extremely powerful about animation. We’ve moved to a time where anyone can download some consumer software and just start working at their own film. It doesn’t mean it's easy by any stretch, but it does mean that the filmmaking craft with regards to animation has been democratized to an extent. It’s similar to when 8mm cameras or the iPhone was released; suddenly everyone had that technology at their disposal. Writer/director/editor/producer/composer Gints Zilbalodis (“Away”) has been using that kind of technology his entire career, and now his second feature film (as well as his first worked on by staff other than himself) has arrived, made in Blender, and completely wordless.
“Flow” follows a motley crew of misfit animals dealing with a flood that drastically changes their world for the worse. There’s a small black cat, an oafish dog, a lumbering capybara, a kleptomaniac ring-tailed lemur, and a watchful secretarybird. The group is forced to work together to navigate a boat around this newly transformed world, looking for a safe place to stay, while also dealing with other animals looking for help and confrontation.
The art style is worth considerable praise, as Zilbalodis’s animals and world all have a very clear brushstroke, hand-painted aesthetic to them that results in a film that feels like a living painting. It also has numerous moments of purely wonderous beauty, throwing realism to the wind in favor of communicating a very specific emotion purely through the film’s visuals. Without a voice cast to fall back on, everything relies on the various meows, woofs, caws, and grunts from the animal cast, and it's kind of astonishing how well it works. Much like animated characters like Gromit from “Wallace and Gromit,” there’s a lot of emoting here purely with eyes and eyebrows.
Zilbalodis’s score (yes, he composed the music as well) is practically another character in the story given the lack of dialogue. It ebbs and flows with the cat, effectively our main character, and the use of music makes things feel like an old-school cartoon in the vein of Merrie Melodies, where each and every thing is set to the beat of the music. The layered sound effects and naturalistic environment build with the music to create a calming effect, even as more harrowing events take place. It’s almost the filmic equivalent of ASMR, bringing the viewer into a beautiful and peaceful landscape.
Co-writer Matīss Kaža (“Neon Spring,” “The Taste of Water”) and Zilbalodis make a very smart decision with this tale that helps to set it apart and work on a larger level than other tales like this: while there’s an easy climate change analogy and influence to be drawn here, there’s also never any deliberate showcases of a “past world” for audiences. There’s no abandoned homes or skeletal remains, no clues of what happened to the humans or where they even are. Sure, there are homes and buildings, but they smartly disregard any easy decision to try and “explain” what happened before this adorable black cat took the center stage. It results in a more interesting and fulfilling work.
On a fundamental level, Zilbalodis’s careful attention to these animals and their mannerisms results in an animated film that’s not only able to be universally understood but also interpreted. With just some inflections on their noises and eyebrow movements, each animal quickly takes on a personality remarkably different from any of the others. Yet, they’re all so easy to understand. You immediately “get” the cat’s frustration with the dog, the bird’s defensiveness of his new friends, the ring-tailed lemur's desire to collect above all else. So much comes across so clearly, all without uttering a word. It speaks to the power of the medium of animation on a fundamental level.
“Flow” is an extremely lovely, calming, and exciting animated film. Spectacularly gorgeous in its visuals and its music, it’s hard to find a negative thing to say about it. This borderline-epic tale of trying to find home might wrap up in a little over 90 minutes, but it takes just a few moments for you to fall in love with each member of Zilbalodis’s animal motley crew. 5/5
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