An adorable black cat with luminous amber eyes fends for itself in “Flow,” snatches a fish from a pack of distracted mutts and runs away with its prize as the dogs chase after them for just a few seconds. Visionary animator Gints Zilbalodis’ virtual camera dives after the cat, revealing a bright, computer-generated world in which humans are strangely absent, but their influence is acutely felt.
Perhaps that explains what happens next, when an almost Biblical flood—which could very well be the result of man-made climate change, though Zilbalodis never specifies this—brings a herd of wild animals in his direction. The cat’s ears flatten and he crouches low to the ground, just as “The Lion King” did in that film’s iconic wildebeest scene, as a giant wave thunders behind the deer. Seconds later, the forest is flooded and the cat desperately tries to stay afloat. (The deer seems to have disappeared completely, as often happens in a film that remains doggedly committed to the main cat.)
This impressive opening shot lasts over four minutes and simply wouldn’t be possible in live action, for as many reasons as a cat has whiskers. Even with the use of drones, cameras cannot move through space as nimbly as Zilbalodis shows us, creating an immediate kinship between the audience and its feline protagonist. But there’s also the obvious fact that no filmmaker could train animal actors to do what Zilbalodis’s imagination demands, as suggested by that apocryphal story about several kittens being dropped off a cliff to get the shot in ‘ The Adventures of Milo and Otis’.
In almost every respect, “Flow” could only be animated. And it could only be as hynotically animated as this by Zilbalodis, the one-man world builder responsible for 2017’s indie wonder ‘Away’. At the premiere of his new film in Cannes, the young Latvian author explained how, after three and one Having spent half a year making ‘Away’, ‘Flow’ represents the supportive coming together of a team – an idea that is becoming increasingly clear. because the cat’s survival depends on the other species it encounters during its fascinating journey.
Little by little, the ensemble expands to include elegant cranes and trinket lemurs, a Lovecraftian-looking whale and a random marmot, each of whom come to the cat’s aid at different points in his journeys. The animals don’t talk in “Flow,” but they don’t quite behave like animals either, such as when they seize an abandoned sailboat. Yet their silence marks a crucial difference between this project and the relatively anthropomorphic tradition of American cartoons, even as Zilbalodis wants us to read a human allegory about what his cast experiences over an epic 85 minutes.
The dogs are the first animals to break character: they pile into a rowboat as the water rises and beckon the cat aboard. While they just chased the black cat, the pack now seems to recognize the bigger crisis and lend a helping hand – although one of the film’s challenges is how to read animal motivations limited to a limited set of expressions . Think about this: the film is about a cautious creature who learns to trust others. “Flow” is something of an anomaly in that it places more weight on rich, impeccably lit environments than on character animation.
That’s in keeping with Zilbalodis’ style (“Away” featured just one person, who never spoke and was barely emotional), and yet, given that he has a team of collaborators this time around, it’s reasonable to expect that the performance of the animals will be good. more nuanced. Instead, the film looks a bit like a high-resolution video game (think Myst) or a really fancy screensaver, with the critters floating against all those dazzling 360-degree vistas, with little sense of weight or gravity. If anything, the film’s many long, floating plan sequences make everything feel a little more artificial. That may not bother young viewers, but it defies the physics-based principles of CGI.
Although “Flow” looks nice, it is not expressionistic enough in style to forgive these technical shortcomings. You know that feeling when you watch a computer-animated cartoon that wowed you at the time (say, an early episode of “Shrek” or the now prehistoric “Ice Age”) and realize that a few years later the technology no longer does? . can’t keep up? The problem with ‘Flow’ is that it already looks dated – commendable, but rudimentary at the same time. It’s as if Zilbalodis decided to dump an ocean’s worth of water into the Uncanny Valley.
Still, animal lovers will bond with the cat and its furry companions almost immediately. From Jiji, the feline sidekick in “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” to Bob, who stole the show in Skydance’s “Luck,” the unnamed star of this film has tough competition from other animated black cats. But it’s hard to resist those golden eyes, or the way “Flow” involves all kinds of endearing feline behavior, from knocking objects off ledges to swatting at the lemur’s dangling tail.
That damn cat may have started out as a loner, but by the end this little group of creatures has saved each other enough times to be inseparable. ‘Flow’ illustrates this beautifully through a group reflection that contrasts beautifully with the opening shot of the cat staring down and seeing only itself in the water. Don’t run away as soon as the credits roll, because a satisfying glimpse into one character’s fate is hidden at the end.
