Flow: charming animal odyssey turns its limited resources into strengths

So often when we see animals in animated films they appear as mascots, pets or stand-ins for ourselves. Flow resists such categories and instead seeks an animal’s perspective of the world which humans have ruined.  

The last feature film by director Gints Zilbalodis, Away (2019), was an almost entirely solo effort, the Latvian animator took on everything from storyboarding to score composing and sound editing. His new film Flow – which has been making waves in festival competitions since Cannes and Annecy – was made with a full team but remains similarly DIY. You’ll spot Zilbalodis in no fewer than five departments in the credits. As a result, control over the film’s tone and approach feels complete and precise, all in service of an impressive environmentalist fable which also stands as a great case for the democratisation of digital software: the film was animated in the open-source 3D creation suite Blender.  

Where Away was an odyssey of a man on a motorbike, the protagonist of Flow is an intrepid little black cat. The cat lives alone in an abandoned house in a forest and the drawings and carvings that remain in the space tell us it was once inhabited by some kind of sculptor. The strangeness of the 3D world Zilbalodis builds is immediately apparent: giant, eerie statues of cats loom over the trees; there are relics from a world that humans built and then abandoned.  

In an unsettling prophecy of the earth’s not too distance future, cities live underwater in the wake of a biblical flood. Water overwhelms the forest. The cat must flee the comforts of the house, ending up in a sailboat with a dog, a capybara, later a (very big) bird and a lemur. They drift aimlessly, more or less coasting on survival instinct, but rather than have them eat each other, we watch them work together. 

Zilbalodis and his team turn limited resources into striking idiosyncrasies. That begins with the fact that the film has no voice work whatsoever, instead taking on the challenge of tracking the character arcs of animals both without dialogue and by minimising any anthropomorphism. The refusal to give the animals it follows too many human qualities makes it an interesting test of empathy in a film with climate change and environmental catastrophe very clearly on its mind.  

The ‘handheld’ camera stays low in mimicry of a cat’s stature, while naturalistic movement and animal characteristics are highlighted over cartoonishness. There’s comedy in their conflicting behaviours: the capybara is relaxed while the cat is prickly, the dog is overly familiar, the lemur is a moron and weird little hoarder. Their familiar actions stand in for slapstick and quipping – the film is committed to being entirely physical as it tells a story of an unlikely collaboration.  

Saying the ins and outs of that story out loud makes it sound simple and maudlin – cat goes on biblical odyssey, learns selflessness – it’s Zilbalodis’s methodology and the animation that makes Flow feel so sophisticated, testing the limits of how we project human emotion onto animals in a film and quietly ruminating on the permanent damage we’ve inflicted on the planet.  

► Flow is screening in the Journey strand at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival.