Flow

(Straume)

dir: Gints Zilbalodis

2024

When was the last time you watched an animated movie from Latvia? When was the last time you watched anything from Latvia? I watch films from anywhere, but I don’t think I’ve watched anything from Latvia, ever.

Then I wondered if maybe Latvia was a made up place, since it sounds awfully similar to Latveria, the made up country from which comic book villain Doctor Doom comes from, and is the king of. But no, it’s real, snuggled up as it is between Lithuania and Estonia, all three of which are former Soviet republics.

You know, one of those places Putin has, like Doctor Doom, vowed to re-conquer, just like Ukraine.

No. Latvia is a real place, and this is a real film, albeit an animated one, albeit an animated film from Latvia that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film a couple of weeks ago.

It probably helps that there were no subtitles. The movie is entirely dialogue free, which makes sense when I tell you that there are no humans in this flick. There are lots of animals, but they are of the lazy, non-talkative kind. They’re not voiced by celebrities, and they don’t have catchphrases, more’s the pity.

They are animals. Our main animal, our main homey is a cat. The cat doesn’t have a name, it’s just trying to survive in a world that looks like it had humans in it before, in fact up until quite recently, but none seem to still be around. The cat often hangs out at a house where clearly some sculptor lived, and carved stacks of cat statues, including carving what looks like an enormous hill into the shape of a cat. Of the sculptor, nothing remains other than their works. Look upon their works, ye mighty and despair.

Cat doesn’t care. Cat just wants somewhere comfy and dry to sleep, and the sculptor’s bed does all that nicely.

The problem is, however much the cat might want this world to continue on as it always has before, some kind of cataclysm happens, and the surrounding areas are flooded, flooding in a way that doesn’t seem to be about to end.

A cat is as poorly equipped to survive the end of the world as any of us are, but it seems with a bit of luck, and the help of a bunch of other animals that the cat has no way to communicate with, they might all just survive for a little while longer.

It is hard to classify as to what this film is. It’s an adventure kind of film, but it’s not Watership Down, a book and adaptation that traumatised a couple of generations of kids at least. It’s not a film trying to convince us, as if we didn’t know already, that nature is red in tooth and claw, as in, harsh and pitiless. If anything its central premise is the opposite of that: life has a flow, an energy, and most critters understand innately even against their instincts that they came come together in times of need to help each other through.

It is charming and a thing of beauty to watch the relationships develop between the cat and an overly friendly golden lab, a capybara, a lemur and an imperious secretary bird, as they all hitch a ride on a boat that was just drifting past. One can quibble about how much different animals would be able to set aside their natural instincts and work together in such a way, or figure out how basic tools / physics operate. To that I would say: such quibbling is churlish behavior. This isn’t a documentary. No-one is arguing that it's realistic. It’s, ultimately, a fantasy film, but I hate to break it to you, those toys in the Toy Story movies couldn’t have really done any of the things they ever did, because they’re mostly inanimate objects with no senses or ability to express themselves or their levels of self-awareness, which equal exactly zero.

Their journey is something of a mysterious one, because we don’t really know what’s happening, in the same way they don’t either, but they respond or take action in order to stay alive. And staying on the boat seems sensible, for the purposes of staying alive, and yet it seems they are on a course, willingly or not, somewhere.

For most of the flick I would say it is pretty naturalistic, but there is a turn later on into the mystical which made me reconsider what the flick was ultimately about. I’m no film scholar nor a Latvian filmmaker, so there could be many elements lost on me. There was something about the appearances and re-appearances of a strange looking whale throughout the flick, and I wondered at some points whether the whale was meant to be like God or some divine being (as opposed to the divine being that was singer and actor Divine!).

The secretary bird is a strange one, as well. It protects the cat from its other flock mates, who I think want to eat her, and is wounded / ostracised for its trouble, and finds a makeshift home with the found family on the boat. But it might be on some kind of spiritual journey of its own, that the others are oblivious to. Like all of the critters on the boat, the makers find ways to get the essence of the bird’s character across wordlessly, and yet we’re in no doubt as to how they feel about something through body language alone. It seems to know something none of the other critters know.

The lemur, like the dog, has a number of compatriots that the boat crew interact with on and off, on their own boat/journey, but there’s some kind of attachment / acquisitive thing going on, and a fixation on a mirror which maybe, I could be reaching, is some kind of spiritual statement. As a Buddhist it’s easy for me to interpret everything through a Buddhist perspective, but that doesn’t mean it was the intention of the filmmakers.

Still, I don’t think it’s that much of a reach to assert that maybe it’s a shorthand way of getting ideas about vanity or materialism across in a novel way. The lemur literally has to give these things up at a certain point in order to be rescued / continue living.

Dogs are dogs, and don’t change in any way, no matter the story, because they’re goofy and loving from the start and goofy and loving in the end.

It’s the cat, though, that we care about the most. Every time the cat transcends its fear it gets to keep living a bit longer, as if to say it’s okay to be afraid, but you still need to keep scooting forward in order to save yourself and your friends. I’m not generally a cat person but it’s safe to say that by the end of the film had I been asked to I certainly would have happily given my life for that cat or that capybara.

Because of the cataclysmic flooding you might think this is a flick preaching about how bad it would be to allow climate change to continue to change, with shots of factories or industry polluting the planet up until the last minute, but in truth we are given no indication that this occurred. Of humanity we see the remains of their boats, and some cities, but nothing beyond that. For all we know in this world the humans were herded up by some superior species and carted off as a delicacy for their high tables in some galaxy far, far away.

Or maybe they abandoned the planet when they’d ruined it sufficiently, and it’s recovered to an extent, with the animals now left in control, but they’re all trapped on some red world being tormented by some tech oligarch.

None of that seems relevant. I’m not even sure it’s set on ‘our’ Earth. The “solution” as well, to the flooding, also isn’t a scientific one, so I am not sure ‘science’ played much of a role in the endeavor.

Who knows? Not I, and not the cat. This was a lovely and enjoyable film, and in no way outstayed its welcome, being a healthy 84 minutes. I like that running time. I support that running time.

And I support this animated movie about a lot of water and a resourceful cat.

8 times you should really go against the flow a few times in your life out of 10

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“Meowr” – another classic line from that wordless masterpiece - Flow