Review: Flow — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Flow

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

Writers: Gints Zilbalodis, Matiss Kaza, Roy Dyens

Director: Gints Zilbalodis

Now Streaming

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

Majestically rendered and lovingly conceived, this wordless tale of adventure and friendship breaks virtually every rule of 21^st century animation, which happens to make it one of the most distinctive, most practically perfect animated films in recent memory.

The plot could not be simpler: A cat, a dog, a ring-tailed lemur, a capybara, and a secretary bird cling to survival in a wooden boat, cast adrift in a post-apocalyptic, sea-covered world. Floating with the currents — which rise and fall with catastrophic speed — they drift past and through remnants of human civilization: enormous sculptures, stairways hewn into rocks, a Tibetan-like mountain city.

There’s a disturbing monumental quality to all those creations, which makes the apparent disappearance of humanity all the more unsettling. But there seems to be no doubt: This is now a genuine Animal Planet.

When we meet the cat, he is dwelling comfortably in the pleasingly cluttered wilderness home of a now-absent human, seemingly only recently departed. The owner was clearly an artist — drawings and wood sculptures abound, including, outside, a towering, cat-shaped monolith that looks a lot like our feline hero. Then come the rising waters, and that abandoned boat, and the adventure begins.

As I type this, I suddenly realize the film gives us no hint regarding the gender of any of its characters (an expert in capybara physiology may disagree, but I’m a simple layman). No matter; a film like Flow, played in pantomime on an almost mythic scale, invites the viewer to make all manner of suppositions, almost as if we are collaborating with the filmmaker in fashioning the backstory.

With Flow, Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis establishes himself as one of the world’s most innovative — and resourceful — animators. He and a small team of artists spent more than four years making Flow, working with a free, online computer animation program. The system’s limitations leave the animals at times vaguely unfinished, lacking the every-little-hair detail that is the hallmark of, say, Pixar and Dreamworks films. But the Big Boys’ obsession with perfection often seems aimed at making us forget about the artists behind the work. Seldom do computer animated films have the hand-made quality of Flow. Beyond that, the animals’ behavior is uniformly spot-on: Zilbalodis based the cat’s whimsically authentic movements and behaviors on his own pet, and his animation team visited zoos to study the creatures up-close-and-personal.

While humans are absent from Flow, the qualities Zilbalodis bestows upon his animal creations are unmistakably human, adding to the fable-like nature of the story: the cat’s curiosity tinged with caution, the dog’s yearning for companionship, the lemur’s child-like selfishness, the capybara’s aloof detachment, the secretary bird’s stoicism. The first shot of Flow depicts the cat staring at his lone reflection; the final one witnesses the collective of survivors likewise studying their images in a puddle. Zilbalodis’s moral is stark, yet poetically resonant: We may think we’re facing life on our own, but like it or not, the future belongs to all of us.

You’ll not find the snappy dialogue that makes so many current animated films verbal endurance tests. There are no musical interludes, unless you count the haunting passages when composer Rihards Zaļupe’s almost subliminal score accompanies the animal adventurers’ silent journey (Zilbalodis collaborated on the music). And while most latter-day animated films seem to suffer dissociative identity disorder as they careen between vintage pop references for the grownups and bathroom jokes for the kids, here all the humor, physical and visual, is accessible to the entire audience, no matter their age.

A few days following publication of this review, Flow will go up against a contingent of splendid big studio animated films at the 2025 Oscars. Arguments can be made on behalf of all of them — Wild Robot, in particular, is a knockout example of the high art an animation studio can create with a virtually unlimited budget, and Inside Out 2 is only the highest-grossing animated film in the history of the movies.

But I’ll be rooting for the little black cat and the floating menagerie of Flow, a universal ‘toon with enough broad action to entertain children of any age — and plenty of food for grownup thought.