You’ll quickly run out of ways to describe the never-ending beauty of Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow. Its visual splendor is so overwhelming that the awe-struck breath you take upon seeing the movie’s opening image might as well be held until its final moments, just to save yourself the physical exertion of gasping over and over again. As grand as its visual scale may be — brought to life via immersive 3D animation — Flow manages to remain an understated and gentle trip through an unfamiliar Earth. It’s a masterfully animated spectacle that allows you to experience the dangers, mysteries, and small joys of the world through the unlikely perspective of a courageous cat.
When discussing Western animation, we don’t appreciate the massive effort it takes to get animated movies made in international territories. Rather than a massive studio like Pixar or DreamWorks fronting the entire costs, European animation is often subject to a melting pot of tax breaks and government funding from different countries. To piece together the $3.8 million budget of Flow, multiple avenues of funding were required from three different countries: Latvia, France, and Belgium. Flow‘s producer, writer, and director, Gints Zibalodis, known for founding Dream Well Studio and for his 2019 animated feature film Away, collaborated with Belgian studio Take Five and French studio Sacrebleu Productions to bring this silent epic to the big screen, an intercontinental collaborative effort.
The smaller budget and narrower path to being green-lit are traded off with a more creatively daring animated tale than any major Hollywood studio would ever consider spending millions on. This dialogue-less adventure follows a black cat on a wondrous journey to survive a great flood of biblical proportions, requiring it to work with animals it previously saw as nothing but a threat. As these animals travel and even boat across a newly aquatic planet in search of dry land, not only do they not talk, but they are also barely anthropomorphized. One example can be seen with the small, beady eyes of an adorable capybara being preserved rather than the film giving it huge, expressive pupils.
The animals in Flow each flaunt their own visual flare. For the animals with short coats of fur, like one charming ring-tailed lemur our feline protagonist befriends, the fuzzy watercolor effect the animation imbues them with gives their movement a deeply satisfying fluidity. Meanwhile, feathered critters, like the main Secretarybird, look cushiony, tactile, and ethereal all at once. If Flow were nothing but a proof of concept, or even test footage, for how animals could look and move in this animated art style, it would still be endlessly watchable.
Flow is the rare kind of animated film that also captures the very precise wonder of playing an open-world video game. The imaginative lighting creates an exciting feast for the eyes that evokes the feeling of an RPG where new adventures lurk at every corner, as does a cute Nintendogs-coded golden labrador retriever, and the extremely dynamic camera movement that frequently leads to remarkable one-shot sequences. However, more relevant than that is writer-director Gints Zilbalodis’ dedication to minimal, environmental storytelling.
Flow even has a moment akin to the famous opening to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where our leading black feline surveys the world it’s about to explore. This outstanding introduction will leave your jaw agape and create tingling goosebumps; the sight of mountain-high structures submerged in a great body of water inhabited by whales is difficult to forget. Additionally, as the cat and its animal companions traverse this vast landscape, they find monuments to humanity, a species completely absent from the story.
We see houses, temples, and statues of both humans and animals, which make us ponder how Planet Earth got to this point. Did our civilization perish? Has this corner of Earth become uninhabitable by man? Did humans simply leave the planet? Asking these questions is a more gratifying and engaging experience than being telegraphed the answers. The script’s mysteries and little to no explanation make its setting far richer, just like coming across ruins of past societies in a Legend of Zelda game.
Those droplets of environmental storytelling deepen your immersion into Flow. With an animated movie that looks as stellar as this, including the fact that it was made using free software, it’s easy to get caught up in the technicalities of how this production team pulled this off rather than truly investing in the plot. Flow strikes the delicate balance between being a profound meditation on Mother Nature and a thrilling adventure. Sometimes, the plot will meander, a purposeful break from the action and anxiety that comes with a survival mission, to let you process the events. Some viewers might check out during these inconsequential moments, though at each narrative turn, Flow expertly keeps you locked in its grasp.
Most people see animation as a sugar rush — a surface-level pastime that can help families with kids kill a couple of hours. We desperately need more animated features like Flow, movies that lodge themselves in our minds by imagining things we have never seen before and presenting emotions we’re not already expecting to feel going in. We have become used to animated films that make us laugh for two-thirds of it and then expectedly cry in the third act. But what if an animated film was more elusive? That’s exactly why Flow is so great: it keeps things undefined.
The way Flow builds the relationships between its animal characters is masterful, and there is plentiful sharp humor and wit to be gleaned from them as well. However, the film’s methods of keeping itself visually interesting through surrealism and mystery make Gints Zilbalodis‘ Flow a special movie that will live long in our memory.
Flow hits theaters in Los Angeles and New York on November 22 and then expands nationwide on December 6!
Release Date: November 22, 2024.
Directed by Gints Zilbalodis.
Written by Gints Zilbalodis & Matīss Kaža.
Produced by Gints Zilbalodis, Matīss Kaža, Ron Dyens, & Gregory Zalcman.
Cinematographer: Gints Zilbalodis.
Composers: Gints Zilbalodis & Rihards Zalupe.
Production Companies: Dream Well Studio, Sacrebleu Productions, & Take Five.
Distributors: Janus Films & Sideshow (U.S.), UFO Distribution (France).
Runtime: 85 minutes.
Rated PG.
