The closest thing to a big surprise at the recent Oscars – maybe a teeny bit closer than Mikey Madison beating Demi Moore – was a tiny Latvian film hammering the best giants such as Disney and Universal could muster in the race for animated feature. Now, close to a year after it premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Flow arrives in cinemas to spread warmth, invention and a smidgen of apocalyptic unease. You could see the film as a piece of outsider art.
Flow, made by Gints Zilbalodis using Blender, an open-source animation package, eschews all dialogue for an impressionistic drift downriver towards an encounter with oblivion. Conrad on a laptop? Well, maybe. But there is also a little of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows and a lot of Sheila Burnford’s brave cats and dogs from The Incredible Journey. Cineastes will get on board. Children will rewatch it until the pixels wear out.
Our hero is a dark – maybe grey, maybe black – cat without a name (though I’m betting many fans will end up calling it Flow). We begin with the animal encountering two dogs squabbling over a fish. Doing what his species does, the cat nabs the prize and pelts off in a hungry fury. A rush of stampeding deer looks to foretell a flood that sweeps feline and canine antagonists into confusion. We find ourselves in an abandoned cabin littered with elegant sculptures of cats. Is this where the animal lived before the catastrophe? Was he or she the model for the wooden effigies?
At any rate, more flooding occurs and the cat eventually finds itself in a sailing boat with a lolloping Labrador, a superior secretarybird and (what else?) a sedate capybara. Yes, there is something of Life of Pi here too.
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Someone somewhere surely has an anthropomorphism scale named after him: at one end ducks wearing sailor suits and driving little cars, at the other Werner Herzog rumbling about the unsentimental brutality of animal life. Flow sits somewhere in the middle of the Anthro Scale. The creatures certainly don’t talk. Zilbalodis has studied his own pets and also wildlife footage to create movements that feel consistently authentic. The cat lowers himself at moments of confusion and darts after any flashing reflection. The Labrador is forever stomping towards items of potential interest. In contrast the bird seems above and beside it all – not prone to the mammals’ taste for interaction.
Yet there is a humany intelligence at work here. The bird ends up piloting the boat. The cats and dogs appear to have some wider understanding of the looming global threat. It is as if Zilbalodis has noticed the aptitudes that pet owners impress on their charges and has extended that into something a little less fanciful. Yes, the Labrador is a good boy. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. I mean, yes, he actually is.
The coolness of the aesthetic stops any of this feeling sentimental. Zilbalodis and Rihards Zaļupe provide a score that throbs between menace and airy reverie.
The film is charming, but not exactly inviting. That contradiction may be down to a class of low-budget animation that rarely makes it to the big screen. Flow could look a little unfinished to those raised on Pixar and DreamWorks. Fans of the excellent feline video game Stray will occasionally find their fingers twitching towards the x-button. But any reservations about the medium are ultimately forgotten as the wider messages rise up to solemnly greet us. It is later than we think. Flow needs to make no specific points about human misuse of the planet. Its generalised sense of environmental dread reminds of something we all know and constantly pretend to forget.
Flow is in cinemas from Friday, March 21st
