Flow

Okay, when I say “animation is cinema” this is the kind of stuff I mean. The phrase has become a rallying cry for the incurious who are content to watch the standard array of franchise fare, big studio IP intended to sell merchandise. “Animation is cinema” but they don’t want to watch anything foreign outside of anime. “Animation is cinema” but they don’t want to truly explore what the medium has to offer. Flow offers a lot. Its art direction will feel familiar to those who grew up on video games - Homeward Bound by way of Ico. The first few minutes of film include an ambitious long cut that set the artistic tone of the film. These moments showcase lush greens, long sweeping camera movements, and some of the best animal acting I’ve seen in an animated film I’ve seen in a long time. Gints Zilbalodis and his team clearly put in a lot of study, because even dog breeds of different temperaments exhibit movement and behavior unique to them. I have a pet shiba inu, after all, and the dumb shiba inu that has a few minutes of screentime moved exactly like my own. Without a single word uttered, the onus of the film’s narrative hinges upon body language of animals with vastly different habits from one another, and even then you can see how these animals shift their behaviors over the course of the film in subtle ways as disaster forces them to act together. Desperation can cause people to do act out first before they come together and in this film it’s much the same for animals. While the source of the flooding is not made clear, it doesn’t need to be clear. What needs to happen is something for these animals to come together, on a boat, navigating the world. The cat acts as our central focus, content in its isolation. We see it first enter a house, curl up, and go to sleep. Allowing its journey to expand outward, spurned on by urgency introduces us and it to an array of characters that act as foil - a practical yet smelly capybara, a hoarding lemur, an overly-familiar dog, an incredibly generous and focused secretary bird. It’s a simple way to explore this theme, but several other mature themes are explored, again, all wordlessly. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to, say Aguirre the Wrath of God when you see a lemur cult overtake a boat, for instance, or Werkmeister Harmonies when the cat comes face to face with a whale. The fanaticism flies in the face of the community of differences of the capybara boat. The behavior of “like” groups retain most of their animalistic traits, the cat and crew develop true empathy, allowing such empathy to even come out against their own initial self interest. This is why the focus on animals for its stars makes Flow’s themes so interesting. We already anthropomorphize animals in our day to day, an attempt to liken them to us. Flow bucks a lot of this, only allowing more anthropomorphism to take hold the longer the animals spend among each other, pulling off something that The Wild Robot was unable to pull off until its final moments. The growing sense of community is allowed to be gradual. The beauty of life and living itself is amplified in animation in a way that live action cannot emulate. Wilderness cannot be choreographed, but it can be studied