Flow: Swept Away

Zilbalodis’s character design is remarkably streamlined, even metonymic, unlike much of the background detail. Reflecting what he has called “naturalism rather than realism,” these screen animals are readily identifiable but steer away from the high-def hyperrealism that obsesses much American studio animation—whose titans Flow handily beat out for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (also the first Oscar win for Latvia). The designs of the cat, the Labrador, and the capybara especially eschew whisker-sensitive textures and make an elegant use of shadow that is painterly in its economy. That simplicity is paired with behaviorally precise gestures, poses, and facial expressions, fleshing out an assortment of emotions and traits: the cat’s fear responses and calculating of distances for a jump; the capybara’s chill, avuncular air, a benevolent deadpan, in a body that can suddenly drop for a nap like a sack of potatoes; and each dog’s let’s-play sense of engagement, along with a general posture of distractibility by the next thing to come along. The closest the film comes to anthropomorphism might be with the most humanoid of its creatures. The lemur who joins the boat totes a basket of trinkets, and seems anxious to be included in a tribe of helmet-wearing lemurs that the boat passes; in one Disney-like gag, it meditates in a traditional lotus pose, cross-legged and fingers pointing up.

The boat crew of animals (which, to the wary cat’s disappointment, takes on board a gang of dogs that the cat had earlier fled from) joins a long tradition of animal troupes and feuds in animation, though there’s also some internet DNA in the film’s interspecies friendship. Zilbalodis has confirmed that online memes around capybara cool were an inspiration for including this steadying beast, who becomes a calmness coach and quietly diligent lifesaver, grabbing food, steering the boat, nudging the lemur to leave its flooding home. In the emotional calculus of the movie, the capybara tempers an undercurrent of fears about forces beyond one’s control: water rising, home disappearing, strangers forced into one’s life. (For further research: the film’s sense of overwhelm and its chronicle of negotiating obstacles and society could posit this as a work of neurodivergent-friendly cinema, dramatizing sensations of embodiment and a stranger-in-a-strange-land outlook.)

The final quarter of the film introduces an almost mystical aura that deepens the incident-heavy story. It arrives under the auspices of the secretary bird, a four-foot creature that the cat first encounters during its breakneck flight from the dogs, and that later becomes a valuable member of the boat. This bird leads the cat, and the story, into a transcendent realm with a scene that takes place at a dark, rocky fortress that bird and cat ascend, seemingly at the ends of the earth. The bird appears to silently beseech the stormy skies, which swirl like a nebula; the score (largely written by Zilbalodis) features a Vangelis-esque wash of synth. It’s a moment presaged by one other dreamy flourish—the cat’s nightmare vision of deer stampeding in a tight circle (a fantastic, omenlike image that in fact is a real-world behavior)—and matched in awe by an aching close-up on the eye of a whale. These sublime moments remind us that, for all the resourcefulness of these animals, the serenity of Flow’s deserted landscapes also declares a terrible truth. Where did every human go, but to death?

In the twentieth century, the emptied earth became an axiomatic nightmare vision of the nuclear age, but more recently, the apocalyptic imaginary has shifted decisively toward climate collapse, a scenario positively epidemic across television, film, and literature (not to mention looming in reality). Besides the fact of destruction, Flow also addresses the fragility of a collective facing massive challenges that require cooperation, not just in an ongoing sense on the boat, but also through a climactic cliff-hanger rescue that hinges on whether a few dogs can stay on task. It’s possible to read the dogs as proxies for a terminally distracted humanity, and maybe, too, the group of lemurs who can’t tear themselves away from a screen (well, in this case, a mirror). By these lights, the reason the secretary bird ends up on the boat—its flock excludes and physically hobbles it, apparently in reaction to its defending a member of another species, the cat—could illustrate the equally devastating competition between value systems.

For all the film’s resonance with other climate-change art and literature, Zilbalodis has denied the theme as an inciting idea and instead has said the film is partly a parable about working as part of a team (a Latvian-French-Belgian coproduction that incidentally thanks a remote-sharing software suite in the credits—call it Workflow). Whatever the precise authorial intention behind Flow, its elemental storytelling, its undertow of emotion, its underdog production, and the novelty of its back-to-basics, nonverbal visuals have not only attracted armies of admirers to theaters but no doubt also inspired a few future animators. Possibly the greatest endorsement, though, is the film’s embrace by the animal companions of many viewers, as numerous videos (and my cats) attest to its sense of immersion. That might lead some to assume that Flow is a tribute to human-animal companionship—except that we’re not in it. Perhaps these creatures’ efforts to survive convey a lesson about the constant work required to coexist and, effectively, to maintain society: use it or lose it.