Flow
Sometimes you search an entire year in vain for the film which will allow you to fall in love with cinema, and what it can be, all over again. Flow is that perfect film. Springing from the mind of writer/director Gints Zilbalodis and co-writer Matiss Kaza, Flow follows a nameless black cat, and the various other animals he will meet along the way, in the mostly abandoned woodland setting where a flood will displace everything. Featuring no humans, nor narration or dialogue of any language, Flow is a survival story told through its use of real animal sounds, and the sounds of the surroundings, helping to bring the characters and their world to life.
From scaredy cat frightened by everything he encounters, be it a pack of dogs or the water slowly rising, we follow this cat on his journey learning to survive and eventually thrive in a world he was initially ill-equipped to handle. Along the way the mercurial recluse will make an odd assortment of friends including the capybara who seems to have a knack for saving strays, the sticky-fingered lemur, the injured secretarybird, and the overly-affectionate Labrador Retriever whose fate all become intertwined as the world continues to get washed away.
The troubles our cat and his new friends will get into aren't overly anthropomorphised. These aren't Disney or DreamWorks characters waiting to burst into song or kung fu. Instead these are animals reacting to a changing world as animals would. As such, when new dangers are inevitably revealed there are real stakes and concern about who, if any, of them may survive. We see plenty of evidence of man from the abandoned homes, to the weathered sailboat offering temporary shelter, to the statues and shrines scattered across the landscape, but the world has be abandoned to these animals and the cruel whims of nature they will be forced to survive.
Created using the open-source software Blender, Flow doesn't have the standard modern CGI look. Instead we're given more of a fully-realized yet surreal watercolor design which meshes beautifully with the water-theme of the film in which our cat, literally, learns to go with the flow. The result is a dreamy but completely believable tale of a cat, heightened by danger at every turn, which made me invest more, far more, than most live-action films of 2024.
Watch the trailer- Title: Flow
- IMDb: link
