An early draft of this review was originally published on December 21, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, several months before it appeared here.
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The flood is here.
The Black Cat, having fled the violent advance of a tsunami, worries her way around a cat-lover’s home that seems to have been recently abandoned. The wooded property is full of cat statues, and the attractive upper floor of the home still has canvases of half-sketched cats on the artist’s desk. But the human beings are gone — gone from the property, and seemingly gone from the world. The water is rising. And the cat is beginning to realize that all she could depend on is going to pieces. There may be no high ground high enough to escape the swelling.
In Flow, the enthralling new animated masterpiece by director Gints Zilbalodis and his co-writer Matīss Kažathe, the Black Cat does not speak English. The Black Cat is a Black Cat, not a Disney cartoon. She — I am going to call the cat she, acting on intuition, although the film does not specify gender — is nine tenths a cat as we know cats: wary and watchful, clever and resourceful, solitary and sometimes vain, prone to venturing into predicaments without anticipating the risks. Her physicality is exactly right, making her perhaps the most convincingly lifelike cat in all of animation.
And yet we latch on to this feline so fast that it’s as if we know her situation, or anticipate it. We feel a soulful bond with this cat whose world is crumbling into the irrepressible tide. Flow gives us not a single word we recognize in spoken or written word, but we bond with this cat and her occasional animal companions with an immediate understanding that this is about us.
The Black Cat, looking around in a panic for solid ground, lunges for a passing sailboat and finds herself in the company of a stranger who is different from her in so many ways: a capybara, blunt-nosed and raspy, but, it turns out, easy company and amiable.
Other passengers arrive…
- A Labrador retriever, playful and ridiculous and flamboyantly friendly, has parted ways with a pack of anxious and ungenerous dogs and does not seem to miss them so terribly.
- A lemur, whose hands grasp and caress an increasing collection of relics, becomes obsessed with and possessive of a vanity mirror that reveals him to himself and thus seems to imprison him in a narcissistic curse.
- A secretary bird, a towering captial-S of snowy white plumage, acts contrarily to her flock, paying attention to the plight of a vulnerable as if this activates some maternal impulse. (Warning: I’m not very familiar with secretary birds, but they play substantial roles here, and they are both beautiful and terrifying. If birds give you nightmares, proceed with caution.)
And I am catching glimpses of who I want to be in relation to my neighbors. I want to be the capybara who makes room for someone else in need. I want to be the bird who is willing, at great cost to herself, to care about a cornered outcast. I am cringing as I recognize myself in the lemur who spends so much of these glorious and dangerous days distracted by the “selfie” in the mirror, or how the reflections cast by that mirror can send the cat pouncing on illusions and chasing false lights in vain.
And all the time, as I am mesmerized by this menagerie of fantastic and furious creatures, by the paradox of their devastating and yet glorious environments, by the way a rush of water can transform a familiar world into a wonderland of ruins and surprises and horrors and beauty. The animation here, which my friend the animation scholar and illustrator Ken Priebe informed me was created with open-source Blender software, is simplistic and seemingly unfinished in some aspects of character design. But those choices, like the traditional simplicity of foreground characters in anime, allows for the richness and depth of the environments to enchant us and persuade us that we are really here, immersed in this revelatory crisis with this unstable and anxious community.
Flow is so much richer for its lack of a celebrity voice cast — or any voice cast. Thank God I never have to think about Chris Pratt — or any of the Chrises — as the credits roll. In that sense, Flow has more in common with classic silent films than any recent animated feature I can think of. Having said that, the sound design and score immersive and evocative. There is a shocking rush of color and sound in the film’s closing act — a whiplashing and thrashing of water through rainforest branches — so exhilarating, so hope-restoring, that my eyes filled with tears. This is a world full of surprises. Sometimes, it seems that we’re visiting a different earth in another dimension, where the mysteries of the ocean look much more like deep-sea dragons dreamed up by Hayao Miyazaki, and where Divine Intervention might not be outside the realm of possibility. But those occasions are all the more awe-inspiring for how familiar and, well, earth-y the rest of this film’s dwelling world is.
Note: For a fantastic meditation on how the portrayal of animals in cinema can affect audiences, and how essential our engagement with animals is to understanding human nature, read the essay “‘Who’s to Say?’: The Role of Pets in Wes Anderson’s Films,” by C. Ryan Knight, published in the collection The Films of Wes Anderson, edited by Peter C. Kunze.
The most magical flow here is the grace of the “camera.” Such masterful composition in almost perpetual motion! It’s clear that the animators were committed to framing every moment from the most exciting vantage points. I kept thinking “That’s the best possible angle on this scene — and not just because it looks amazing, but because of what we learn from it.” Virtuosic visual storytelling. There isn’t a moment that isn’t at least visually interesting. And so much of it is breathtaking.
This kind of storytelling won’t resonate with everybody, or even many. I’ve learned that from seeing people cringe and turn away from works like Richard Adams’s Watership Down and The Plague Dogs, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, and George Miller’s Babe or (moreso) Babe: Pig in the City that some cannot find peace with a certain balance between animal realism, magical realism, and apocalyptic fantasy.
But I love those films and stories. They move me. Watership Down, for example, more than any other text outside of the Bible, has become the lens through which I best understand the world and my life within it. And I feel very comfortable in this imaginary world where cats behave almost exactly like cats, Labrador retrievers behave almost exactly like Labrador retrievers, capybaras are capybaras and lemurs are lemurs.
Most storytellers would have turned this story into a quest to save the planet. Here, the immediate goal is to merely survive, moment to moment, as anything we might take for granted gets threatened in a sudden turn. And the grander priority, the one that feels momentous and dangerous, is to imagine the possibility of conscience. These almost-realistic animals are granted only slight superpowers by their creators: the ability to learn how to steer a boat by the tiller, for example; or the kind of problem-solving that distinguishes crows and ravens who might figure out how to pull a boat to shore by a trailing length of rope. But the boldest idea comes, I might guess, directly from Terrence Malick’s famous flashback-flourish in The Tree of Life where we see a dinosaur stumble into the concept of empathy, and then the subsequent realization that the restraint of a violent impulse might be, in some sense, Good. We see that moment occurring in myriad variations here, one in particular that looks like a direct visual quote from Malick’s “pre-historic” proposal.
And in that, Flow is a movie about animals that speaks most meaningfully to me about what the world needs now, about what the world has always needed most, about what the future of humankind and Planet Earth depends upon.
The flood is here. In so many ways, the flood is here. It is here in the consequences we have brought upon ourselves with our treatment of this beautiful blue planet as a garbage dump. It is here in the assault on the free press and on higher education, as billionaires and authoritarians seek to make populations poor and ignorant in order to better exploit and manipulate them. It’s here as a rising tide of nationalism and hatred washes away the hard-won glory of a Constitution that seemed too good to be true. It’s here as citizens are stripped of freedoms, and as desperate immigrants and refugees watch their dream of survival and freedom jerked away from them by enemies of America’s founding vision. It’s here as the illusions of power and convenience offered by technology corrupt our capacity for trust, submerging us in waves of mediocrity, fakery, and lies.
So many of us are looking around in disbelief as the good things we’ve considered foundational, immovable, and defining about our culture are violently submerged and dismantled. I look at the ruins of the university I have loved for several decades — a school closing down its programs in Theatre, Philosophy, History, Languages, Journalism, and so much more — and sigh like a heartbroken old man: “How could it come to this?” I look at the communities of churchgoers who taught me to praise God for his mercies, and I wonder how they decided to despise the whole ideals of generosity and grace, how they betrayed the fundamentals of the Gospel, and how they steered the American church toward practices of hypocrisy and cruelty.
And in this place of loss and grief, I feel blessed by Flow. The movie has made me more wonderstruck than I’ve been at the movies in a very long time. As the saying goes, this movie “makes me feel seen.” It reassures me that truths I once thought were simple and obvious might, in fact, still be so. And it helps me see beyond the immediate storms toward a possible future in which all things are slowly being made new.
I’ll be surprised if I meet anyone who loves Flow as much as I do. It checks some very particular boxes for me — in its animation strategies, in the limitations of its storytelling paradigm, in its moral compass, in its imagination of harmony and reconciliation. But I hope you experience some of the rapture that ministered to me here. I’m definitely going back to see it again on big screens before it’s gone.