FLOW — post human adventure
2024, animation film by Gints Zilbalodis.
Yes, I’ll write about this beautiful film despite the small chance that you’ve seen it or will see it. It’s a feature-length animation film, without words, where all characters are realistic animals, and it ostensibly targets children. The chances of it being especially successful are small, but this is exactly why we have festivals — to discover films that challenge what’s constantly available on Disney Plus, Netflix, and in theaters. And this film is worth talking about.
A Cat in Water
The plot briefly tells of a cute black cat who gets caught in a massive flood that submerges everything. How much is everything? Even mountain peaks are no longer escape points. It’s a kind of unexplained apocalypse. He finds a boat and flows with the current while being joined by animals who are each, in their own way, a kind of underdog: a peaceful and reclusive capybara, an obsessive collector lemur, a golden retriever separated from its pack, and a strange bird that cannot fly. This continues for most of the film, and that’s part of its beauty because “plot” here requires us to see beyond the regular structure of popular films we’re familiar with. There is plot development but, true to its name, “Flow,” it mainly streams through gentle transitions from one development to another without shouting about it.
Let’s examine what makes it unique and turns its cinematic expression into something rare and fitting for this specific film.
First, wordless films are challenging for viewers both young and old. My cute nephew who went with me fell asleep halfway through while his brother thoroughly enjoyed it. Boring? Not necessarily, but as mentioned, challenging. Silent films require us on one hand to be highly sensitive to nuances like body gesture interpretation, and on the other hand often give a feeling that things aren’t progressing, simply because it’s more in the subtext.
In animation, wordless films amplify the idea of “SHOW don’t TELL” where cinematic and animative expression reaches its peak. The creators cannot rely on dialogue to tell the story and therefore must be at their best not only as storytellers in plot construction but in every detail of the film and especially character animation. All the various visual elements are recruited to convey both the plot and the emotional atmospheric experience. Thus, a sensitive viewer is rewarded by being fully absorbed into the film without dialogue serving as a mediating bridge.
This is expressed in the film through several other special ways. This film is directed and “shot” with a camera that knows no rest. It’s not that it’s a shaky handheld camera, rather the camera is dynamic enough to simulate a viewpoint. Whose? Ours, the viewers’. If I’m not mistaken, there isn’t a single POV shot in the film, meaning a point of view from the characters themselves. We move with them throughout the journey, above and below water, but always observing. From this perspective, the direction strongly resembles video games rather than films. The camera is constantly searching for what’s interesting to see. Often it will be action relating to the characters, but even then, the camera doesn’t simply rest on them statically but continues to move as if telling us that at any moment it could turn its gaze in another direction. This strongly reminds one of 360-degree VR films and gives a powerful sense of world-building, for the simple reason that the world exists all around even if we haven’t looked in all directions. The world of the film constantly envelops us. Most familiar films contain shots with composition. That is, the shot that exists within a space is aware of the space and yet the composition of a specific shot imposes itself on this space. The specific angle of the camera and how it positions the various elements in the frame. In “Flow,” however, since the camera never rests, we also don’t get one-time static compositions. This doesn’t mean the film isn’t aesthetic — quite the opposite. It compensates beautifully with a wild and spectacular world with rich coloring and use of epic realism of light and reflections even without relying on static narrative composition.
The gaming-like experience is a choice that suits the film thematically, but more on that later.
Regarding animation, the realism of the animals’ movement, the water, the trees creates scenes that are very complex to produce. Several creatures with different body structures and behaviors, together on a boat rocking on turbulent waters, is not something to be taken for granted in terms of directing and animation timing. But beyond the technical challenge, there is the challenge of readability. That is, how to make these animals communicate with the viewer without over-anthropomorphizing them. The delightful answer is animal nuances. Although each animal speaks in its own language (mainly meows, barks, etc.), they are all essentially singing. Their melody speaks. While we viewers don’t understand the words, the precision in their vocal expression manages not only to convey to us what’s happening to the animals and what they’re trying to express but even to make us laugh. And this, again, without overt anthropomorphization. Most of the animals’ communication in the film is minimalist animal communication: give me, go away, take, let’s play. But what turns them into characters is the precise melody of each vocal gesture until almost like Rose in another film running in these waters “Robot Rose” we get used to listening attentively to these nuances until we connect with them as if they were human. We’ve learned their language.
Against the Flow
In such a film that can’t easily shout its messages, the entire cinematic expression serves what the film conveys. I’ve already mentioned the gaming experience in the film but how does it become cinematic expression? The answer is that spatially mobile camera movement invites us viewers, like in a video game, to search and ask ourselves questions while watching: what’s safe? what’s dangerous? who’s for us and who’s against us? Like the film’s hero who needs to make decisions during the journey, we become active even if only in following the choices and our involvement in them. Because video games always shout at you: “what will you do now?” while films mostly emphasize “what will happen now?” and this touches, in my opinion, on the film’s main theme.
Flow deals first and foremost with flowing. The movement of the film’s heroes is with the current from the moment the world is flooded and there’s no choice but to stick to the boat. And since it’s difficult for animals to navigate a boat with a high level of control, most movement is with the current itself. It will take them where it takes them. But our heroes, especially the main protagonist, don’t just swim with the current. Animals, as we usually know them, are driven by instincts with the strongest being survival instincts. Our animals are in the midst of an apocalypse. The world is flooded, all of it, food is running out, the future is unknown and sometimes you share a boat with an enemy or former enemy (somewhat like “Life of Pi” where an Indian boy shares a boat with a tiger). But although the characters are completely realistic and behave like animals in every way, they are still frequently called to swim against their instinctual current and make active choices. This choice is a moment of ennoblement, or transcendence. The cat, time and time again, goes against his survival instinct and saves his enemies, gives food to others, or learns to live peacefully with creatures far from him, from a large bird to a whale that appears like some deus ex machina when needed and disappears. These behaviors of choice versus survival that accompany us as a sort of overarching theme throughout the journey are amplified when dealing with animals, but the emotion they evoke in us is completely human. We identify and deliberate and mainly feel that this choice is what defines humanity in the first place: empathy, altruism, and the ability to see beyond the specific survival-oriented viewpoint of myself as an individual. Not everyone is capable of this. And especially the group of hitchhiking dogs who are literally animals that come to help in rope-pulling but the moment a rabbit appears in the vicinity, they abandon the help they gave to those who saved them and turn to chase. Here the gap is revealed between the “human” golden retriever who doesn’t chase after the rabbit, and his “animal” pack members who in an instant disappeared from the area and flowed with their animal instincts.
Memory of Humanity
In the world of “Flow,” there is no past. With almost no time jumps from the beginning of the film, our journey is linear, flowing event after event and often in a kind of real-time. When the world is flooded and destroyed, we don’t get to say goodbye to the previous world, pre-apocalypse, because we never knew it at all. However, several interesting things characterize that destroyed world. The first is that it has no humans in it. Were they there? Were they eliminated or did they escape beforehand? We don’t know. So how are there houses? And how is there a boat and decorative objects like a mirror, if there were no humans there? All these questions receive no answer but perhaps gain meaning in light of what I described earlier. The human place is revealed even where there are no humans. Humanity hovers above the waters even if in a kind of muffled echo. The lemur who is obsessive about collecting objects reminds one of King Louie who settled in the abandoned human temple in “The Jungle Book” and sees himself as a kind of king and perhaps a type of human imitation without there being an original. This feeling of apocalypse within apocalypse reminds one of the film “Zootopia” where animals behave like humans but humans themselves are not present. Is this “Planet of the Apes” for children, where animals need to find their place anew in a world without humans? Maybe, but for that why do we need the second apocalypse of the flood? The film provides no answer but the question itself echoes throughout it. Just as our gaze seeks something to hold onto in the camera movement, and just as the animals reveal themselves as ones who transcend their animal side through moral choices, and just as the film doesn’t reveal to us information about the world and broader context beyond what the animals see leaves us in tension with our human existence. This helplessness puts us humans without a big picture to hold onto. We are lost and survival-oriented exactly like the characters, holding onto only our choices and our existence.
Did I say we have no hint about the world that was? Not exactly. Our cat, at the beginning of the film, lives in an abandoned house, but the house itself is surrounded by cat statues. They are scattered in feline poses around the house where he lives, and he is the only cat to be found. In a way, this is a post-cat world no less than it is a post-human world. But this felineness, embodied in the scattered figurines and especially in the giant cat statue that stands not far from there at the height of a building, is characterized more as worship than as animal. The term figurines that I use hints at idolatry, worship, more than artistic sculpture.
These cats create an environment that invites not only self-discovery for the hero cat but also a deep question: what happens when a living animal becomes an idol? Precisely because he is surrounded by cat idols, our cat can go out to discover who he really is, in a world that defined him through frozen statues and destroyed itself.
Here lies the paradox: the worship, which originally was meant to elevate the essence of the cat, turns it into merely an image — into stasis. The cat, unlike the dog, symbolizes freedom and natural flow, the animality that can exist only in the present. But when the cat becomes a statue, an idol, it loses this animality.
The water, which is also present in the story as a constant backdrop, offers a different answer. Unlike the stasis of the statues, water is constant movement. It invites us not only to recognize the stasis but also to free ourselves from it. To leave the magnificent but frozen world of cat idols — and dare to flow, to discover, to truly live.
