Flow (2024)

PG for practically nothing offensive.  Honestly, the fact that this isn't G rated is gobsmacking.  (Gobsmacking probably isn't a word, but I am properly gobsmacked.) There are a few moments where there's the mildest anxiety produced.  For example, there's a really mean bird in the movie.  Also, a lot of us --and I'm including myself in this --get some anxiety about large, underwater creatures.  There are large, aquatic creatures that make me a little anxious.  But this is a tame movie.

DIRECTOR:  Gints Zilbalodis

I can't stress this enough.  Watch this movie with your kids.  There's nothing wrong with the movie.  Also, if you have a kid who is mildly obsessed with cats, then you are going to be parent of the year for a while with this one.  Penny lost her mind.  Completely enraptured with a movie about a cat who acts like a cat and there's no talking throughout.  That's Penny's jam.  The least cat thing that cat does is to steer the ship like a person would.  Sure, my brain screamed, "How are those animals steering the ship so well?  Shouldn't they have run into something by now?"  But the rest of me was totally cool with that.  Of course that's something that the movie needs, so I'm going to be cool with animals handling a rudder.

This is one of those rare combinations of being both a Best Animated nomination coupled with a Best International nominee.  That's something that, oddly enough, my brain has a hard time wrapping my head around.  I also heard that this thing has been sweeping up the awards circuit.  I don't know if it has a chance at the Oscars, which tends to go to big budget, animated tentpole movies (or Studio Ghibli...).  But there's something really good about this movie.  I will talk about what the movie is not.  This movie isn't a traditional kids' film.  There's nothing funny in the movie.  It's incredibly subdued, even though the animals are constantly fighting for their lives.  Now, I'm just going to get this out there and it did affect how I watched the movie.

I mean, the movie is just a less sci-fi version of Stray, right?  I know.  It's  a film blog.  I should be sticking to movies only.  But I've been preaching Stray, a game I played on PS5 last year.  For those not in the know, you control a cat who is lost in this city.  The cat has no real powers.  The cat stays mostly catlike the entire game.  There's no moment where they start talking or walking like a person.  That's Flow.  Heck, both Stray and Flow even sound like they could be the same project.  Also, both kind of make your brain work the same way.  The story in both stories are rarely explicit, but you can work out most of the story through paying attention and crafting a narrative that makes sense given the information presented.  (Isn't that true about all stories?  Shut up.  Just watch / play both of these things and you'll get where I'm going.)  Now, is Flow stealing from Stray?  I don't know, man.  I don't know how intellectual theft works.  There are scenarios where one influences another.  That's entirely possible.  In fact, it's even plausible and acceptable.  There's also a scenario where great minds think alike.  After all remember all of those summer blockbusters that followed similar concepts.  Either way, I couldn't get Stray out of my head for the bulk of this movie.  

Part of me wants to talk about the politics of the movie. I mean, with the almost blank slate that the movie presents, it is easy to add a narrative over the film that reflects your own beliefs.  I don't think that it is much of a leap to say that the setting is a direct reflection of climate change.  Mankind is long gone.  There are monuments to mankind's presence on earth in the form of both art and consumerism.  But man is gone and only animals have adapted to the tumultuous world left behind.  The cat, as horrified by moments of intense danger, seems understanding that the world is not one of safety.  Again, I'm putting my own perspective over this because the avatar of the movie can't express frustration or vocalize theories to what is happening.  But when the wall of water comes at the cat at the beginning of the movie, none of it seems shocking.  The cat has lived in the abandoned house for a good deal of time, comfortable with the entrance through the broken glass.  When that water comes, it seems only natural that the cat has to make peace with the other animals to find a place of safety.

But as a good dystopian story should, it uses the setting as a place to play, but not make the story only about that.  Where Zilbalodis succeeds the most is the fact that there are relationships between the animals in ways that give them defined personalities. Heck, I can even see that these characters even have animal-specific moral codes.  That's where the story flies.  The cat seems to be the most noble, constantly open to the idea that other animals, despite traditional predatorial roles, are worthy of survival.  The bird is an alpha character, using intimidation to frighten others (even though the bird that we get to know is far more open-minded than the other birds.  The lemur is the consumer, obsessed with objects to the point of self-destructive hoarding.  The capybara is the lazy one, along for the ride, yet caring for the others.  The dog's an idiot.  A lovable idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

And now I'm going to do a little bit of reaching.  I tell my students to choose evidence before writing.  Flow is silent and almost beyond the need for a plot.  It explores a world that has been destroyed by climate change and puts its characters through the wringer.  But ultimately, this might be one of those fantastically woke stories that manages to affect people in a better way.  There are few groups of animals.  The bird separates from the birds because they are violent jerks.  The lemur seems to distracted to stick with the other lemurs (who also seem to be wildly distracted).  The other dogs are bullies.  But the animals who stick together come from all walks of life.  I pointed out their motivations earlier.  They seem incongruous to maintaining relationships.  Yet, these are the animals that are the ones who are defying the end of the world.  As gorgeous as this world is, it is falling apart in a tragic way.  The last shot of the movie, after all, is the slow death of the mysterious sea creature.  But these creatures have to abandon clan to form a new family that may be considered non-traditional.  My overly hippie nature can't help but be a little moved by that.  Sure, it's not the first story that weaves that theme throughout the film.  But with a story so sparse that I'm almost forced to imbue the story with my own background, I'm glad to see that the filmmakers were probably shooting for that as an idea to be spread.

The only thing that leaves me pause with Flow is some of the visuals.  At times, Flow is an incredible piece of visual art.  I posted an image above showing how the movie absolutely stuns most of the time.  I'm going to say that much of the cat is fantastic.  But there are times when the movie looks a little rough.  Like, depending on when you walked in on this movie, you'd probably have a different opinion on the visual impressiveness of the movie.  Sometimes the movie looks like it would take Pixar down a notch.  Sometimes it looks like a bad video game cutscene.  I wonder if it was a budget thing or a timing thing or a just-settling for pretty good thing.  But the visuals are wildly inconsistent.  When they work, they really work.  But the art as a whole isn't necessarily fluid.

Still, Flow is honestly a masterpiece.  I don't know if there was an animated film that knocked my socks off as hard as Flow did.  The only thing that is probably going to stop it from winning at the Academy Awards is the fact that it is a foreign film that not a lot of people saw.  But who knows?  Right now, I'm probably putting money on Flow.