Currently Streaming
Directed by Gints Zilbalodis
Starring a Cat, a Capybara, a Secretary Bird
Released December 6th, 2024
Rated PG
2024 may not be remembered as a particularly strong year for live action movies, but it was a remarkable year for animated films, including the clever Inside Out 2, the heartwarming The Wild Robot, and the thrilling The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. All of those movies are worth watching, but the best animated film of the year is Flow (Straume), a Latvian film animated with an open-source software called Blender. A beautiful (and stressful!) film, Flow packs a lot of emotional depth into its 85-minute runtime, as we follow animals banding together to survive the aftermath of a tsunami.
A black cat on a grassy hillside is trying to find food when a devastating weather event happens, throwing the land into wet chaos. The cat is fighting for its life and on the verge of drowning when it takes shelter on an abandoned boat floating aimlessly on the water that has overtaken the land. This boat will eventually become a makeshift home for the cat, a capybara, a labrador retriever, a ring-tailed lemur, and a secretary bird. These very different animals immediately clash with one another, yet through their trials they begrudgingly learn to trust each other as the days pass and the water rises. We are concerned about the safety of the black cat and all of its animal companions throughout the duration of Flow, a harrowing animated journey that may have created a new genre of film: the family-friendly disaster movie.
Though we do not see any humans during the course of this story, we have evidence of their existence, the biggest being the boat that our animal protagonists call home. We also see statues, various homes, and other structures, symbols, and remnants of society. One surmises that people had received a warning of the coming disaster and moved to safety, leaving the animals behind. At least twice in the film the animals come to make very human decisions, once to steer the boat’s rudder in order to rescue stranded dogs, and again as a rope and pulley system is used to save other creatures. While these scenes did take me out of the movie a bit, they are easier to digest once you consider that the film isn’t exactly set in our reality. One of the indications to the audience that this isn’t a strictly reality-based tale is the inclusion of a whale-like creature that sports strange tentacle-like appendages. Another could be the magical realism of a scene that takes place on a mountain top during which the storm subsides, the sky opens up, and water droplets start levitating as the cat watches the secretary bird ascend to heaven. It’s an extraordinary sequence.
This could be classified as a silent film, as there is no dialogue present outside of the chirping, barking, screeching, yelping, and meowing of the animals. The film’s sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas used actual animal sounds for each character, so when you hear the cat meow, that’s an actual cat you’re hearing. This is the case for all except one, as Coïc-Gallas felt the low grunts of a baby camel fit the film more than the high-pitched sound of an actual capybara.
From its first frame, Flow demands your attention due to its dazzling animation, but the element that elevates this into one of the year’s best is its music, composed by the director of the film, Gints Zilbaldois, with Rihards Zalupe. Full of rumbling drums and hypnotic tones, their compelling score reminds me of Stuart Copeland’s groundbreaking work on the music for the Spyro the Dragon video game trilogy. In addition to working on the score and directing the film, Zilbalodis also co-wrote the screenplay with Matīss Kaža.
Flow is a film about the importance of working through hard times with others, including those with whom you have little in common, or with those you would possibly consider enemies under different circumstances. Flow contends that the differences that divide us are not nearly as important as the things that are important to us: family, safety, love. If these animated animals can find common ground despite their differences, perhaps there is hope for us humans to act accordingly.