My grandson and I agree on this–oh, and so does Jubjub, our cat, who finds it fascinating. Flow is the best animated movie ever. Maybe the best movie ever, period. Am I exaggerating? Maybe. . .but only a little.
This award-winning indie animated feature-length film was made by talented Latvian artists (and others from around the world). With its integrity and what the lead film-maker called its “handcrafted” look, it has won the hearts of audiences everywhere, and a number of prestigious prizes, including the Oscar. If you want to know the story of how a courageous movie like this got made completely outside the gatekeepers and powerbrokers of the industry, take a look at THIS.
Flow is the story of a cat abandoned after, seemingly, a world-wide cataclysm. Its culminating moment appears to be a massive flood emerging from the depths of the fractured earth. We don’t really know how the disaster came about, because there is no dialogue in this film. We see everything through the eyes of the cat and its animal friends and companions.
The film has been praised for its accurate portrayal of the animals, even though there are a number of incidents throughout the film that can be described as fantasy or maybe magical realism. The cat embarks, with other animals, on an arduous journey when its home is inundated. Along the way, the cat and its animal companions find other animal refugees, dodge many dangers, and learn the important lesson that solidarity is the key to survival.
So what about the animal-human bond in a film in which THERE ARE NO HUMAN BEINGS at all? It’s everywhere in this film. The human-built structures–buildings, cities, monuments. The human boat the animals must learn to navigate. As the film begins, we see the cat napping on a bed in a human dwelling. When the cat exits the house through a broken window, we begin to learn that the humans have disappeared, and this sense grows as the story unfolds.
The main character is a house-cat who seemingly loved its human owner, because it keeps coming back to that spot on the absent human’s bed. And we see how much the human loved the cat. The human was an artist. The artist’s productions are everywhere–from small drawings of the cat all the way to mammoth sculptures of the cat. What happened to the owner, and to all the other humans? We never find out, but we see with sorrow how the catastrophic flood is beginning to drown and erase every human artifact, including the artist’s sketches of the cat.
The animals must forge ahead without human-kind, and they learn how by relying on each others’ strengths. Traditional enemies–cats and birds, dogs and cats, for example–must learn to live with each other. Those who don’t or can’t get left behind, or soon will be, if they opt for a dog-eat-dog world. Some of the dog characters do. The meerkat is torn. Loyalty to its own clan with its parody of human hierarchy and power? Or to the cat and its brave companions? Community–and found family–is everything. But the innocent perish too, even the ones who seem at first glance to be most dangerous.
In one of the most amazing and surreal scenes of the film, a secretary bird who has joined forces with the cat and its friends undergoes a kind of bird apotheosis, leaving the human-ruined world behind entirely.
Were the humans responsible for this drowned world? We don’t know. But we do know that animals have to take charge of the remaining landscape, and in a better way than we ever have, forging community, not competition. This is a great film.
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