Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow
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With each passing season, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid imagining what this planet is going to look like once we’ve finally made it uninhabitable for ourselves. In Flow, Latvia’s entry in the race for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film and the winner of the audience award at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, director Gints Zilbalodis never explains what’s brought on floods of biblical proportions that his protagonist—a young gray cat whose character is “as well-developed as Atticus Finch,” as Calum Marsh puts it in the New York Times—flees after escaping a furious pack of dogs and a deer stampede.
“Fearful and suspicious,” writes Steven Scaife at Slant, “the cat eventually boards a sailboat as water swallows the landscape, falling in with other animals whose personalities are just as easy to decipher: a chilled-out capybara, a hoarding lemur, an excitable Labrador retriever, and a high-strung secretary bird. We’re never at a loss to know how the cat feels at any given moment, as Zilbalodis finds multitudes in the position of its ears, the wideness of its pupils, and the skittering of its legs.”
In the Los Angeles Times, Robert Abele notes that “none of the furry or feathered stars of this meditative, wondrous adventure need to wisecrack their way into our hearts. Rather, we get to know animals as animals, not as vaudevillians engineered for maximum cuteness (although the star cat is damn adorable).” Abele finds himself “marveling at Zilbalodis’s fluid, shimmering visual majesty in establishing his computer-rendered ecosphere, marked by purposeful, roaming camerawork reminiscent of a cinematic marriage between Spielberg and Cameron at their most revealing and exciting . . . One of the year’s richest discoveries, Flow belongs as much to a timeline of animal-centric masterpieces (Au hasard Balthazar, Gunda, EO) as it does the history of animated indies.”
“Compounding the indie flavor,” writes the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, “many sequences look as if they were captured on hand-held cameras: you feel as if the animators are jumping into the water alongside their creations, or scampering after them down forest trails. Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.”
Flow is also “of a piece with Zilbalodis’s lauded 2019 debut Away,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, who adds that “both are essentially silent movies and both owe a debt to the painterly canvases of animation master Hayao Miyazaki. The new work drops characters designed in classic cartoon style into ravishing photo-realistic environments, at times recalling the woodsy landscapes of Danish artist Peder Mørk Mønsted. Images of nature shimmer with light and color, though a shadow of danger is never far away.”
“A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory,” writes Christian Blauvelt at IndieWire, and Rolling Stone’s David Fear finds a connection between Zilbalodis’s fantasia and the endangered world we live in: “For many of us staring down the next four years, the idea that a community can come together to take on the rising tides couldn’t be more welcome or needed.”
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