I haven’t seen many films in the cinema recently. That’s mainly been down to the handful of theatres in my nearby town usually not showing anything I’d be interested in seeing, but also the fact that I live in the countryside and can’t drive means I have to structure the whole day around going in to see something. I’d rather there be a good reason to go through all that rigmarole, you know?
Well, I found out that one of those local cinemas, an old church converted into a movie theatre called the Triskel Arts Centre, was showing a couple animated pictures over the next week. They’re films I’m hardly gonna see elsewhere, and I’d probably forget they’d exist afterwards, so I figured it might be fun to check them out while they’re in town. The first of these was Flow, a movie I knew basically nothing about apart from it winning the Oscar for best animated feature back in March.
Sometimes it can be good to have some expectations of what you’re about to watch, but there’s also a fun to going in completely blind and seeing how the film takes you. Unfortunately, this was one of those times where it didn’t really work out, and that’s not something I can pin down wholly on the movie.
It’s a perfectly fine film, one that’s got an admirable amount of craftsmanship in its visual storytelling. I was particularly impressed with the camerawork, how it moves around and follows the characters. It makes some of the more tense bits feel tangibly drawn out, even agonising, by staying with the characters and refusing to cut to another shot unless it’s necessary. We’re placed in the thick of it, unable to leave no matter how rough things get.
The highlight of the movie for me was a sequence early on where the cat falls off the boat and desperately attempts to get back to it, sinking deeper and deeper into the water until they all but drown; only to be saved at the last minute by a strange creature that lifts them to the surface, before they’re snatched by a bird and carried high into the sky. This sequence plays out for one continuous shot that follows the cat for a good few minutes, an already remarkable feat which also wrings out a lot of different emotions from dread to relief and shock. It’s not as lavish with so many moving parts as the Spielberg Tintin movie’s notorious single shot chase through Bagghar, but it’s just as noteworthy in its own right.
In reading about the film afterwards, I was surprised to learn that there was no storyboarding involved, according to the director Gints Zilbalodis. He talks in a couple of interviews about constructing the environments and then moving a virtual camera around to get ideas for shots. That certainly explains how and why the camera is allowed to get so involved with the action, as if it’s as much a character as any of the movie’s cast, but it also explains why the environments feel so well established in their own right.
I found that there was a relatable sense of geography, which allowed me to more vividly picture each location in my head and connect them in a way I normally don’t manage with films. That might be why I can still remember a lot of its places; the flooded city streets, the Anor Londo-esque mountains looming in the distance, the shoreline where the birds fight, the big tree at the end of the movie. Despite appearing for relatively brief times, they each made an impact that still lingers in the back of my head.
Another aspect I appreciated was the decision to make the cat pure black (as much as can be allowed, especially with bright lighting that makes them appear grey). It’s often hard to make out a black cat’s face beyond their eyes, so you can’t see exactly what the cat here is thinking and have to come to your own conclusions about how they’re internalising what’s happening. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of not being able to unambiguously read a cartoon character’s emotions, from model sheets for The Simpsons and King of the Hill of all things, so it was nice to see that playing into the film’s overall sense of ambiguity.
But I think that ambiguity might be part of why I feel so distant, for lack of a better word, from Flow. Ambiguity isn’t a bad thing at all, it’s often what makes any work more interesting by not spelling everything out and asking you to build your own ideas or connections. But there’s the risk that the work won’t resonate with you enough for you to be able to do that, and I found that I couldn’t resonate enough with what this was trying to do.
I’m embarrassed to say that part of this comes from the film’s lack of dialogue. Obviously a wordless movie can have a much greater reach, without a pesky language barrier blocking off those who can’t understand those words, and it plays right into that aforementioned ambiguity. But I find that I have trouble watching lengthy films where there’s no dialogue to the point of becoming fidgety, because I don’t have something to take me out of my own brain if I’m not seriously into the story being told or how it’s being told. Words create a momentary distraction from my overthinking, and they interact with the sights, sounds and other parts of the film that better enhances my appreciation of the whole thing.
Flow wouldn’t be a better film with any kind of dialogue or words, not at all. However, it does mean I have to look at the rest of it to get invested, and I have to admit that I couldn’t manage that. While I’ve been complimentary of the visuals in part, I wasn’t terribly into the overall artstyle. The character animation is believably lifelike in recreating animal movements and I liked how some of the wider shots would render the world with thick clouds or light reflecting off the endless waters, but it otherwise didn’t move me in any way.
The same goes for the music, which I didn’t care for. Apart from the more tense sequences where the scoring feels appropriate to the moment, I found most of it a bit too typical sounding, with its strings-heavy ambience backed by very minimalist piano tinklings. I get the impression that it’s trying to instill a sense of wonder, but I wish the music had been more mysterious or even alien.
It would’ve complimented the world we get brief glimpses at, where there’s impossibly large empty cities, crumbled ruins everywhere and gigantic monuments to animals. There aren’t any humans in this film, apart from the outstretched spindly hand and obscured face of a drowned statue. All you get are unspoken echoes of their presence, and that’s the one spot where the ambiguity did manage to work for me.
Otherwise, I’d clearly stopped caring after a point, unable to get invested in the story it was trying to tell or even the basic emotions it was going for. When it reached its conclusion, I genuinely didn’t understand what I was supposed to be feeling or thinking. That’s not the film’s fault at all; when a friend explained it to me later on, I got straight away what it was trying to say, and felt quite silly that it had gone over my head.
I wish I could’ve enjoyed Flow more, because I should be impressed that it exists at all. Reading into a bit of its production and release, I like how its story of a cat learning to co-exist with other animals acts as an allegory for director Zilbalodis learning to work with other people on a feature film (something he brings up in interviews like the ones linked above). I love that it’s become Latvia’s biggest film, and that it’s earned as much acclaim and notoriety as it has, including that Oscar which is probably the reason I was able to see it at all.
It’s a film that will show folks a glimpse into the wider world of animation they might not have otherwise gotten, and an impressively constructed picture with compelling cinematography and environmental design. But it’s also a film I couldn’t jive with, so I find it tricky to recommend from a place of personal enthusiasm. Do give it a watch if you can.
That’s all I’m able to say, really.
Special thanks to gammaton32 from the World Animation Discord, who pointed out what the ending was trying to say, and whose thoughts gave me the drive to expand this into a more elaborate write-up than I’d originally intended.
Screenshots taken from FanCaps.net – https://fancaps.net/movies/MovieImages.php?name=Flow_2024&movieid=4745
FrDougal9000 writes for hardcoregaming101.net as Apollo Chungus. When he isn’t writing about video games, he is cultivating his love of animation that’s only increased over the last few years as he’s explored the wide, weird and wonderful world of the medium.