JunkDror

Flow (2024) is an animated feature film with a cat protagonist that dances with death and plays with paws in ways so harmonious you won’t realize the film doesn’t even have any dialogue. An innovative tale of survival, sanctity, and silence, director Gints Zilbalodis gives us a look into a familiar yet distant world that is fascinatingly archaic and curiously mystical. 

The film takes place in what appears to be a post-human time with abandoned structures covered in untamed, lush greenery and old battered boats being used as a safe haven for wildlife. There are no additional signs of humanity nor context of what happened to it throughout the rest of the picture, but you really don’t need any anyway. Flow is bigger than humans, and not just because there is a massive flood that fills Earth’s deepest valleys and consumes its tallest mountains. It is apocalyptic and prophetic–like if humanity were to disappear tomorrow, nature could relive its primitive course once again, as it was supposed to.

Interestingly enough, the end of human existence does not seem like an old memory but a healing mystery. As we are introduced to the main figures of the film–all “wild” animals–we begin to notice that some are closer to domestication than ferality, like our protagonist, the quiet black cat with a typical hostility towards dogs and a discomfort for getting wet. It hisses when provoked, purrs when content, and meows for attention, just like any other feline friend you have at home. So of course, it starts to lose its bearings on its last remnants of normalcy when it is swept away by a disastrous flood that leads to encounters with other animals it may have never experienced otherwise: a lazy capybara, stingy lemur, and valiant, terrestrial secretarybird. Surely, a black cat cannot help but attract the magnetism of a golden retriever along the way, whose playful and lighthearted personality might be resistant to evolution. 

Though the film presents each animal with beautiful accuracy–from their musculature to their characteristic instincts–navigating through the natural disaster, and with others not of their own kind, challenges their innate conventions socially and physically. For the secretarybird, this looks like a courageous beak on beak confrontation with the head of its flock, resulting in a sentence to exile, a brooding attitude, and a selfless call to serve his new dysfunctional family. Similarly, the lemur, a sneaky trinket collector with luxurious taste, is presented with the opportunity to join a conspiracy of like-minded lemurs; but in reminiscence of their intimate journey for survival, chooses the diverse posse that carried him through it–like an ode to friendship and its precious irrationality. 

The independent black cat may not have a clowder to respond to, but its sharpness and agility is tested just as much. Early on in the film, our feline friend uses up nearly all nine of its lives, drowning into the abyss of the flood and falling from heights of the sky. By the end, however, we are proud to see it grow in confidence and compassion. Diving into the water and fishing for food becomes a routine birthed from adaptation–a Darwinistic need to accept the unpredictability of ecological change and remain fit for survival. Our black cat with a self-awareness and agency that knows no bounds may be a look into a future 2,000 years from now, where a new species of cats with gills make robust predators.

The honest beauty of Flow is most palpable in its traces of otherworldliness and the interconnectivity of life. It is a story inspired by the sacredness of Earth and its creation, a profession of oral tradition dating back hundreds of years, but a truth we so often forget. A symbolic reference to the spiritual quality of nature is demonstrated with the ethereal powers of the Northern Lights, as one of the animals in the film is lifted into the illuminating sky in a Brother Bear (2003) transformative ritual. Just as indigenous cultures attribute the spiritual phenomenon to ancestral ghosts and celestial beings, Flow reflects the Northern Lights as a testament to the mystery of death and rebirth, in a far more kid-friendly way of course. 

Still, the profound discovery of companionship found by this wild group of animals on a miniature Noah’s Ark-esque boat emulates the subconscious inclination towards symbiotic collectivism. Human or not, a breathing being seeks harmony and understanding instinctually–whether in the form of internal or external pursuits. It is a process that transcends differences in communication (I.e. squawks, barks, and screeches) and lifestyles (lethargic capybaras vs. hyperactive dogs), but always relies on selfless mediation to work. Otherwise, your lonely road might just get swept away.