Perhaps the most famous line in ancient Greek thought comes from the philosopher Heraclitus, who said, You cannot step into the same river twice. That's because reality is not a static thing, but an ever-changing flux.
The fluidity of life runs through Flow, a marvelous animated movie from Latvia, which has already been showered with acclaim. Directed by Gints Zilbalodis, it takes a simple premise — a sundry crew of animals gets caught in a flood — and, without a single word being uttered, transports us into a radiant fantasy. At once fun and affecting, Flow made me think of everything from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and The Incredible Journey to the story of Noah and the recent floods in North Carolina.
Flow centers on a slate-gray cat whose home is a big house in the forest surrounded by larger-than-life feline sculptures. It sleeps upstairs in a double bed whose emptiness offers our first inkling that there are no people about. And indeed, no humans will appear in the film. Instead, we follow this watchful, eloquent-eyed loner as it prowls around and gets chased by a pack of dogs, a pursuit interrupted by a deluge that comes whooshing towards them.
The water keeps rising higher and higher. And, just as the cat is about to be washed away, it's able to jump on a sailboat occupied by, of all things, a capybara. Soon they're joined by a scene-stealing lemur, who has scavenged various human knickknacks, like the mirror it keeps looking at itself in. It's like the opening of a joke: a cat, a capybara and a lemur walk into a bar.
As the three float together on their small ark, they're joined by a golden retriever, and a predatory secretary bird, which boasts a crazy-beautiful headdress of feathers, and a body like an eagle's glued onto a heron's legs.
This odd band of survivors seeks to ride out the flood, a dangerous enterprise that forces them to work together and leads them to rescue others in distress, even if they don't always want to.
Zilbalodis pays these animals the respect of observing them closely. He deftly captures the cat's yawns, the movements of the lemur's ringed tail as it's preening and the amiable torpor of the capybara, a creature whose meme-inducing cuteness was recently celebrated in The New Yorker by Gary Shteyngart. Forgoing all dialogue but using genuine animal sounds, Flow is a long way from Zootopia or Eddie Murphy's smart-aleck donkey in Shrek.
While it does humanize its characters a bit — my own beloved cat Nico would sooner drown than team up with a lemur — Flow captures the way animals behave in the wild, as in the ruthless fight for dominance between two secretary birds which leaves one of them unable to fly. The movie weaves together bursts of adventure — your heart may pound as the cat has to swim for dear life — with poetic moments of transcendence I won't spoil by describing.
Like Miyazaki, Zilbalodis uses animation to conjure a big, thrilling world of imagination. Where too much American animation feels frantic — desperate to keep our attention — Flow's images possess a kinetic elegance. They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game, complete, alas, with a few visual glitches you won't find in Pixar. Then again, this is not a big budget Hollywood project. It was made on the open-source software Blender and cost just $3.7 million. To put this in perspective, that's less than 1/50th the budget of Inside Out 2.
Flow is conceived as a universal story that weaves together magic and realism. While the cat and dogs could live in our own neighborhood, the rest of the cast comes from South America and Africa. There's even a whale from the briny deep that surges up, almost biblically, from the flood waters.
This whale's appearance inland is one of the film's suggestions, melancholy but never overt, that the great flood we're seeing may be a product of climate change. Yet Flow is far from a political tract. Rather, it's a classic fable about learning to adapt to life's everchanging flow, no matter how dire things may sometimes get. And like most classic fables, it offers an enduring lesson: A group of creatures overcome their differences and learn to help one another. It's solidarity, not selfishness, that will save them.
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