Review: A cat faces the apocalypse in "Flow"

by Cláudio Alves

Is there a more cinematic animal than the cat? By all accounts, one of the first – if not the first – use of a closeup in film history featured a cat. Yes, dear reader, cat videos harken back to the 1900s, when George Albert Smith's The Sick Kitten proved a delightful diversion. More than a century later, the big screen has seen many felines, from MGM's Leo to Chris Marker's cat-forward experiments, going through a panoply of animated pusses in between. Yet, the seventh art continues its love affair with the cat, finding new ways to celebrate and elevate these natural-born movie stars. 

Just look at Flow, Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis's new film. It premiered on the Croisette before bowing at Annecy, where it won four prizes, including the Audience Award…

Before any considerations on its wordless narrative, its character animation and journey, or the sheer cuteness of the lead, what impressed me first about Flow was how much the moving image embodies its title. Created in Blender, the animated world is observed through a virtual cameral that is, by itself, a mobile marvel capable of taking your breath away. Flowing through the environment with equal parts grace and grounded grit, it can simulate a drone's glide as well as invoke the sort of improvisational hand-held register you wouldn't expect from an animated work. It's a language akin to live-action – Children of Men comes to mind. 

At times, it feels like there's an unseen cameraman whose curiosity matches the proverbial cat, molding the frame into a character of its own. Yet, it's about more than replicating the physical qualities of the real-life device. Often, Flow blurs the lines in ways material reality forbids, extending takes beyond practicality, going from an earthbound low-to-the-ground perspective to a soaring view without any cuts. Such flourishes could've come across as a show of formal ingenuity devoid of motivation. But Zilbalodis makes all the film's elements coalesce, from its biggest swings to the smallest gestures.

Indeed, the virtual camera's expressivity is essential to a picture whose ideas must be communicated in pure audiovisual terms without the benefit of verbalized thought. There's no speech in earshot or humans in sight, merely the marks of their long-gone presence. Furthermore, there seems to be a repudiation of anthropomorphism baked into how the filmmakers approached their critters. In other words, the animals primarily act like animals, even when their emotional arc owes a great deal to human ideas. This is both a limitation and a minor miracle.

Their visages are impenetrable to a certain extent, emphasizing how they move through space and how the camera moves around them. We get to know Cat – our hero – through these mechanisms and constraints. They're introduced in a moment that could read as introspection, gazing at their reflection before going about their business. Cat roams the forest and tries to steal a fish from a pack of wild dogs, outsmarting them all before going back home, an abandoned building surrounded by feline statues. These are the relics of a cat lover of time immemorial, time lost.

Or maybe they are like Pompei's ashen ghosts without the burned flesh inside. There's sorrow in their appearance and majesty, a landscape kissed by a golden sunset that paints it in brushstrokes of light. It's incredible how Flow can be so beautiful as a piece of cinema when the textures feel so beholden to old and outdated videogames. I guess it only goes to show the quality of the animators and filmmakers, how great isn't beholden to technological sophistication. Cinema can survive limitations just as a Cat can survive the world's end. It comes in the morning, when the tiny animal's idyll is interrupted by rising waters.

Seven minutes in, a flood comes over the picture, a wave of muddy water, ready to destroy the world and take everything away from our feline protagonist. If you love cats, as I imagine the filmmakers do, this sequence will be harrowing, made more so by the fantastic sound work full of real animal sounds. The rendering of the characters is as rudimentary as their textures, but the animalistic movements are exquisitely made and full of behavioral idiosyncrasies, clearly indebted to direct observation. That makes Cat's peril all the more frightening. It resembles a painting behind glass, but it feels as real as you and me. 

Once sitting proud on top of a mountain, a giant monument becomes submerged in the hours between a morning wave and twilight, making it seem as if reality itself is being submerged. The sense of scale is massive, forcing the viewer to be well aware of Cat's smallness, their insignificance in the scope of things. Yet, the cosmos may be as fragile as the black kitten who struggles against the currents and finds refuge in a boat taken afloat by the tide and given a new purpose. In Flow, it becomes a new Noah's Ark whose inhabitants form an unsure alliance, some bizarre multi-species crew.

There's a capibara and a covetous lemur, one of those joyful dogs that once ran by the riverside, and a secretary bird whose elegance conceals the killer instinct of a carnivore. Though their connection feels increasingly human as it develops, the initial contact between beasts reveals the cost of putting instinct aside and trusting unnatural companions. Not that kindness is unnatural, mind you. It's as primordial as cruelty in Flow's cosmos – and perhaps our own – be it the individual's action or the world's violent changes. It may even flourish between predators who defy one another.

And don't presume this is a punitive tale, for, despite the biblical flood, this apocalypse finds time for a litany of chuckles. The film is funny as cat videos often are, charming its viewer with tidbits of animal behavior in tandem with its more sobering observations. Cat is an inquisitive little thing, and hungry too. Marvel as they miscalculate a fishing expedition and must endure the indignity of wet fur and the need for another animal's aid. See it melt into silly games by the lemur's swinging tail, and taste the sweet farce of the Cat's annoyance with the canine's loud enthusiasm for everything, anything. 

A giggle is often followed by awe, balanced in Flow's tonal equilibrium. Cat's shenanigans with Dog may transition into a floating passage through the lost city, Humanity in absentia as a monument full of implicit grief. When the camera goes underwater, a kaleidoscope paints itself in flittering fish and philtered sunlight. Finally, the realism of Flow is superseded by a sense of the fantastical, a dream whispered into the animal's odyssey. It crescendos to a mountaintop impossibility that might signal the end of it all or mayhap the renewal of what was thought lost.

Transcending potential interpretations as environmental cinema, Flow comes close to existentialism as it reaches the end. But even then, it's gentle, like a delicate caress of the Cat's back or a scratch behind its ear. Indeed, as the feline confronts death as a leviathan drowns in dry land, the film uncovers a final grace. It's the purr of the Cat and the sound of loneliness overcome, selfishness unlearned for a connection that's somehow more important than mere survival. To the very last minute, Flow is a beguiling work of animation, of cinema. 

I wouldn't extol it as some perfect object, however. The character's visual conception is hard to love, though their animation astounds, and the story's simplicity will frustrate many. For me, though, it enhanced the flick's polysemic qualities, allowing each viewer to take something different from its hopeful melancholia. On the other hand, the music sometimes felt too forceful, cajoling emotional investment out of the audience when the visual storytelling was enough. Still, it's beautiful to the ear, so one can't begrudge Zilabalodis' melodies. In an unforgiving world, beauty is a generous mercy and Flow is nothing if not generous.

Following its critically acclaimed trek through the festival circuit, one hopes Flow will find international distributors. It's undoubtedly one of the year's most remarkable achievements in animated cinema.

Comments

[Angelo]

This looks great!