Flow

FLOW   ***

Gints Zilbalodis

2024

IDEA:  When the earth is overtaken by a catastrophic flood, a feline and a cadre of other animals attempt to find safety.

BLURB:  On paper a fairly archetypal survival story, Flow becomes on screen an idiosyncratic vision untethered from the conventions of narratives with animal protagonists. It does this in part by mostly resisting the tendency toward anthropomorphism, preserving the inscrutable animal natures of its characters through the absence of dialogue and human behaviors. Zilbalodis may invite us to project our thoughts and feelings onto the creatures (whose relatively crude, impassive forms this helps facilitate), but he steadfastly refuses to sentimentalize them. Instead of a plot fueled by emotional through-lines, Flow offers a more elemental, phenomenological kind of journey that foregrounds the raw physical sensations of navigating a perilous world. The animation - with its long, soaring virtual camera movements through land, water, and air - is strongly attuned to an aesthetics of proprioception, creating an embodied experience of what it would feel like, for instance, to be a drowning cat that’s been swooped up to great heights and dropped by a large bird. There is a palpable, at times sublime sense of material scale and the attendant dangers of being a small creature in an unfathomably big, chaotic world. In this way, Flow works better as an immersion in environment than as a story, however deliberately and mythically pared-down the latter might be. It alternately resembles the free-roaming gameplay of an open-world video game and the elaborate tracking-shot cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. You probably won’t feel all cuddly about these animals, but you might feel things more potent, and lingering: fear, awe, even the humbling wash of uncertainty.