Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Flow’ on VOD, a Lovely and Thrilling Animated Fable About a Cat in a Flooded World

Latvian animated fable Flow (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is one of those nontraditional films that find a way to sneak into the awards race and maybe upset some big-studio applecarts – it just sneaked out a Golden Globe win over favorites like The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2, and will almost certainly get an Oscar nod here soon. The movie is from director Gints Zilbalodis, who crafted a dialogue-free survival story in which a lone black cat teams up with a group of oddball animals to survive a calamitous flood in what appears to be a post-human world. He famously used free, open-source software Blender to make the film, which is suspenseful and beautiful and foregoes all the stuff of mainstream animated movies. So there’s no celebrity voiceovers or ultra-detailed look-at-me animation here, and the result is, perhaps ironically, a movie with almost endless appeal. 

FLOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Let’s just call this cat Cat. We meet him (her? It?) as he gazes at his reflection in a puddle. Is this cat self-aware? That may be what this movie is ultimately about. The world that Cat lives in is in a freeform state, it seems. No humans are anywhere to be seen, but the stuff they left behind is, e.g., the isolated cabin of an artist who carved statues in apparently loving tribute to cats, where Cat curls up for naps when he isn’t roaming the woods and avoiding a pack of romping-idiot dogs. This is Cat’s home, until a herd of deer nearly tramples him. They’re running from a flash flood that drowns the house and ushers Cat to the very tippy-top of a tall statue where he perilously perches. We know he can swim, but how far and for how long? We’re not sure, and we feel afraid for him.

Now, let’s pause to observe how Cat is considerably not like most cartoon cats, and instead like a real cat, what with all his four-footed agility, crafty mannerisms, constant napping and withering side-eye. But most cats don’t look at their own reflections like that. There’s something there. Animals in this reality are a little bit, well, more. They look and act like real animals about 90 percent of the time, and the other 10 percent shows a heightened intelligence that allows them to, say, stick up for one another, share food or pilot a sailboat through the floodwaters, which by far trumps my cat’s ability to climb atop the basement ceiling tiles or push open a sliding glass door. (All true. No exaggeration.)

And so this isn’t quite Our Reality, but one that’s remarkably close to it. Cat finds himself in the aforementioned sailboat with a friendly capybara, a lolling-tongued Golden Retriever, a lemur that collects objects in a basket, and a lanky secretarybird whose attempts to prevent others of his ilk from eating Cat resulted in him getting his wing broken and ousted from the group. Sometimes, there’s squabbling within this motley collective, and sometimes, they collaborate quite nicely. There’s another de facto member of the group quietly following them beneath the surface in the form of a whale, which doesn’t look quite like any whale we’ve seen before. Ponder that one if you wish. Where are they headed? Wherever the water takes them, of course. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Robot Dreams, another sweetly sublime dialogue-free animated film, comes to mind, as does the artsier end of animation a la I Lost My Body. But Flow has more in common with Polish wandering-donkey saga EO or minor Disney classic The Incredible Journey. 

Performance Worth Watching: This as good a place as any to assert that the animators here seem to know and understand cats better than any other filmmakers – how they move, “think” and interact with their surroundings.

Memorable Dialogue: “Meow.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Flow is as aptly titled as movies get. In one sense, it’s literal, a description of the force driving change in the plot, its characters simply, you know, going with it. In another, it’s the film’s visual M.O., with long “takes” that smoothly go from tight to medium to long shots like a video-gamer exploring a 3D world. The animation is, presumably, intentionally retro in its digital style, allowing Zilbalodis to play with the light, the blooming pixelation creating a shimmering effect that gives the feline protagonist the lifelike shimmer of a black cat’s coat. And despite the slightly blocky and simplified imagery, the animals always move like their real-life counterparts, interacting with an environment rendered with enough realism – the sound design inevitably stands out in a film without dialogue – to help raise the dramatic stakes.

Beyond that, Zilbalodis presents to us a series of images divorced from explanation and open for interpretation. Perhaps there are hints that this is a post-apocalyptic world; perhaps the animals’ heightened intelligence and, in some cases, strange physiologies suggest an evolved or alternate reality. But wild-goose-chasing details like this is ultimately a distraction when watching a film that’s markedly impressionistic and philosophical, told entirely from a cat’s point-of-view. Cats have mystique, and Zilbalodis toys with and builds on that – what does Cat know and understand about his surroundings? What does he see when he looks into his own reflection?

In one image, Cat sees only himself. In another, later in the film, other characters cluster around him. There’s an ideological tug-of-war in these scenes, where an instinctively self-sufficient cat – notably not as smugly self-satisfied as some cats I’ve known – seems to wonder if joining a diverse collective is beneficial not just in a practical sense, but possibly a spiritual one too. Other members of the group choose to divest themselves from their kind, and others are forcibly ousted. There are no definitive answers to any of these questions, just promptings, and maybe insinuations about how life should be led, especially a life rendered humble and directionless by forces of nature. Where do intelligence and self-awareness fit into this scenario? Where are Cat and his companions going, and why? What are we learning about the balance of peace and chaos in life, and how relationships play into it? Funny, how a stripped-down survival story about a small animal inspires such grandiose, existential questions.

Our Call: Flow is a distinctive, beautiful and subtly provocative film. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.