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Go with the Flow

I don’t know what inspired Latvian animator Glints Zilbalodis to combine The Incredible Journey with Myst, but I really appreciate the novelty of it. His movie Flow is an entrancing experience that carries you along its journey without caring much to rationalize or explain anything beyond the simple instincts at play. We know nothing of its world, which tangentially resembles ours but clearly is not -it is a setting of pure atmosphere and immediate story progression. It is tantalizing though, even as it doesn’t reward your curiosity, in part because it puts you in a space of cognizance with its characters -a group of ordinary animals.
Flow is a movie with no spoken dialogue and no text to suggest a particular language or culture. Its animals are not geographically related -an African secretarybird existing in the same space as a South American capybara. It feels like the movie is openly eschewing easy context for a kind of universality in this story about animals working together to survive a seeming apocalypse.
Whatever the world is, it is bereft of human beings, although their footprints are still present in structures and man-made objects and even the remains of a city. It is unclear how long they have been gone as a couple of the animals still appear to be somewhat domesticated -not least of all a small black cat, the movie’s principal character, whose journey sees it go from trying to catch fish by a river to nearly drowning in a tsunami, rescued by a sailboat and travelling far with a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur, an injured secretarybird, and the cat’s nemesis, a curious, excitable Labrador. At a couple points through the journey they also interact with a group of dogs, the lab’s friends.
There is no anthropomorphizing here, each of the animals behaves like a real animal, with a naturalism in movement and behaviour that could only come from studied observation -these animators must be cat and dog people. And it’s nice how the creatures’ personalities are revealed through this. Yes, any pet owner could tell you their animals have very distinct attitudes, but it’s another thing to have that notion expressed so purely here -no voice-over narration or animal voices; the animation being the only real barrier and Zilbalodis and his team do everything to make you look past that to the authenticity of the animals themselves, and thus nurture a vivid investment the nature of the movie might not otherwise encourage. You see the real animals, possibly in your own life, in the characters on screen, and it makes you that much more concerned when the cat falls off the boat and struggles to climb back onto it or when the lemur acts out when the secretarybird kicks its glass ball, a favourite amusement, off the side of the boat. I definitely identified my own family dog in the way that the lab would try to play with its new friends.
And all this is especially impressive given the animation, which does not look up to the standards of modern animation as we’re used to seeing it. In fact the aesthetic of the movie is such that it resembles the cut-scenes of a video game from about fifteen years ago. The effects look blocky, the textures too polished, the detail intangible; and yet the film is mesmerising, because the animation style is used in interesting ways, additionally proving itself more expressive than it initially appears. It really does feel like Myst or a similar old open-world computer game, particularly in the function of the camera that takes in so much of the world around the cat, explores different angles and lenses along the journey -including one sequence where it is picked up by another secretarybird and treated to an overhead view of the environment before being dropped back down onto the boat.
What's more, the somewhat primitive character of the animation suits well the piece as a whole, and the animals that the story follows, each believable and perfectly resourceful in this drought of humanity. The little storylines that add up to a kinship across species are very fun, such as how the cat in observing the capybara learns how to swim and catch fish, or how the lemur gradually becomes less possessive of the things it collected in a basket, including a small mirror it is taken with -you really feel the heartbreak when it is broken by the roughhousing dogs. Both the lab and the secretarybird wind up forsaking or being forsaken by their own for their sympathy with the other creatures -the latter, something of a wise and graceful model for the others- is literally hurt by the leader over its desire to protect the cat. And the cat's unerring loyalty over this is palpable.
The movie is very dreamlike in its -well, its flow. That lack of dialogue alone gives it a distinct, otherworldly feel, but it's calm, sometimes lackadaisical momentum allows it to touch the senses in an unusually pure and primal way. It relates to the atmosphere of the world and the implication of both decay and rebirth -the story can be seen as a Noah's Ark narrative, though one built on the cooperation and learning between species rather than segregation. The perhaps extinction of the human race is the mark of a hopeful new world.
There is a tenor of the surreal to the movie as well, and hints at some ethereal nature to its reality, as in one provocative sequence involving the northern lights and a recurring whale that looks unlike any whale from this earth. No added context or explanation comes of these -our periphery is simply that of the animals, and in particular this cat -as the movie attempts to translate, and does as effectively as possible, the lens of newness with which animals take in their environment and situation. There's something nice in how much we can relate to them through the film.
Flow is quite hypnotic, and for its moments of danger, very easygoing. The world and the creatures wash over you in a surprisingly naturalistic way, the stylized animation and its captivating aesthetic only heightening its mystifying thrills. It is not for the usual animation crowds, and for its spontaneity and experimentation, it is exceptionally humble. And this makes it all the more charming. On top of everything it is an innately likeable movie -for anyone really who has been endeared to a cat or a dog or finds the more wilder animals portrayed fascinating. A cute movie, and for once that is not an insult.

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