Recent Movie: Flow

Around the mid-point of Flow, the independent, micro-budget Latvian movie that won the Oscar for best animated film earlier this week, there is an image that continues to haunt me. Floating through a flooded, woodland landscape, a ragged sailing boat carrying a small black cat and a capybara fetches up against a manmade tower. The tower is in ruins—one wall open to the elements, upper floors missing, a flight of stairs leading up to nowhere. But it is also a rare instance of intentional order rearing its head in this film, only to slip below the water's surface. All over the tower's floor, and up those pointless stairs, colorful glass bottles and jars have been carefully arranged. A lone lemur is walking around the arrangement, selecting some of the items to go in a woven basket. Did the lemur arrange the bottles? Did some missing human place them, and then disappear? Where did all this glassware even come from, and what is it for? Like so much else in Flow, these are questions that the film raises, and then floats away from.

The absence of humans is notable already in Flow's opening scenes, in which our point of view character, the cat, is introduced going about its day in an idyllic meadow by a stream. The cat lives in a nearby house, and the presence of cat sculptures and drawings in and around that house suggests that it was once the pet of its human resident. The house's emptiness, however, as well as the fact that the cat enters it via a broken window, are only a few indications that the normal running of this world has been interrupted. "Normal" might be a relative term, though, as the presence of a building-sized, incomplete cat statue looming over the house suggests. Like the fastidiously-arranged bottles later in the movie, it has a hint of ritual about it, of a deeper meaning that has now been irrevocably lost.

If the cat has any thoughts on these matters, it is quickly distracted from them, first by a sudden flood which it barely survives, and later by the slow but relentless rise of the waters, which quickly inundate its home. Before long, it finds itself in the sailboat with the capybara, the lemur, and two others, a golden retriever and a secretary bird. The mismatched troupe float around, encountering various dangers and challenges, but mostly acting as our points of view to a landscape that repeatedly delivers incongruous, puzzling images, which recall a climate change-induced apocalypse while repeatedly stressing that this world is not ours. The manmade structures the animals encounter—classical columns poking up from the water, a deserted city full of arches and drowned courtyards, a statue of an enormous hand stretching out towards the sky—feel like they belong in a game like Myst or The Witness, the random pieces of an immense puzzle which we are perhaps not intended to work out. The natural phenomena they witness—a needle of rock that stretches endlessly into the sky, a whale-sized sea creature that melds familiar ocean life with mythological monsters—similarly raise questions that the film does not pause to answer.

For our main characters, of course, these mysteries are meaningless. The impossibility of the sea monster is no stranger to them than the fact of the flood, or the hand mirror that the lemur discovers on the sailboat, and which it puzzles endlessly over. Animals stories are, of course, a time-honored tradition in animation, especially the parts of it that are aimed at children. (Flow isn't specifically a children's movie, but it is one that children could enjoy and, I think, cherish.) As this movie reminds us, there are different ways to convey the personhood of an animal protagonist. In many animated films, animals are simply stand-ins for humans. They speak, and make human expressions and gestures, and their emotional range and journeys are meant to be fully recognizable to the audience. This is the approach taken by Dreamworks's The Wild Robot, Flow's competitor for the best animated film Oscar, whose premise—different animal species banding together to overcome a climate crisis—is quite similar to Flow's, but which nevertheless features a wise, matronly opossum voiced by Catherine O'Hara, or a neurotic, monomaniacal beaver voiced by Matt Berry. 

(To be clear, this is a valid choice, but nevertheless the juxtaposition of Flow and The Wild Robot speaks volumes about the difference between genuine soulfulness and the desperate, calculated mimicry of it. The Wild Robot cribs shamelessly from classics such as Wall-E, The Iron Giant, and Fly Away Home, without ever approaching their emotional impact.)

Flow, in contrast, keeps reminding us that its animals are animals. They do not speak, or engage in any anthropomorphized behavior. The cat behaves like a cat—aloof, skittish, curious. The golden retriever is enthusiastic and friendly and eager to chase things. This is not to say that Flow is a nature movie—even leaving aside that lemurs, capybaras, and secretary birds are native to completely different parts of the world, the animals' behavior is clearly not natural. They solve complex problems and work out the function of tools such as the sailboat's rudder more readily than any real animal of their species could. They forge complicated emotional bonds, expressing emotions such as shame and regret. And their personalities are often informed more by public perception and human projection than zoological reality. The capybara, for example, is stolid and supportive because that's the image that has accumulated around this animal, and when director Gints Zibalodis—who had been insistent on realizing his characters using only real animal noises, rather than human voice actors—discovered that the actual sounds made by capybaras did not convey these qualities, he happily substituted the sounds of a baby camel instead.

Nevertheless, the film keeps reminding us that its characters are fundamentally different from us. That their reactions are driven more by instinct, and their ability to retain and process information is much more limited than ours. Late in the film, a pack of dogs band together to try to rescue one of our heroes. Then a rabbit passes by, and one by one the dogs are distracted and run off to chase it. The animalness of its heroes is often where Flow roots the emotion it compels us to feel for them. When the flood starts, the cat naturally skitters away. But being a cat, it can't distinguish a world-ending flood from "things are not as I want them to be and therefore I must yowl and screech". As the waters rise, it climbs higher and higher, finally ending up on the head of that giant cat statue overlooking its home, without understanding that this is not a solution. Even when it finds the shelter of the sailboat, it often jumps off simply because something has caught its attention, and then scrambles to return.

Unlike other animal stories, which expect us to identify with non-human protagonists, Flow expects us to see through them. To understand the things they can't, to look ahead in a way that they are not capable of. This is the source of both our sympathy for these protagonists, and of the profound anxiety that one feels while watching this movie. For us, finding a boat in a flood is only a temporary measure, a means to an immediate end that does not solve the greater problem. For the animals, it is a natural next step—they needed a place to stand, and the boat is such a place; when it bumps up against other surfaces, they often jump off to explore, heedless of what it might cost them. Though there are hints throughout the movie that the animals may understand more than we (and they) realize—the cat has a prophetic dream; the secretary bird seems driven by inexplicable urges—ultimately they are reacting to the world without comprehending its strangeness. It is left to us to feel fear on their behalf, for being such small, helpless creatures in a world where beings who are capable of planning and looking ahead are nowhere to be found.

But then, does this fundamental inability to understand their world, and the parameters of the disaster it is experiencing, really set the animals of Flow so much apart from us? When you watch a movie featuring a world-ending flood in 2025, your thoughts naturally turn to climate change, to similar images of floods and fires and storms that have become all too familiar from our TV screens (or, if we're unlucky, from our own lives). The further I got into Flow, however, with its deliberately alien setting, the more its flood seemed to be something older—biblical, in fact. The rising waters, the animals gathered together on a boat, the sense of the numinous that suffuses the film, all felt to me like references to that ancient story (late in the film there is even a bird that flies away and does not return). And, like those ancient people trying to make sense of the incomprehensible, the animals in Flow live in a world that is far too large and strange for them to understand, whose disasters they can only hope to weather. 

As the last few weeks in particular have demonstrated, this is often our predicament as well. Even those of us who are knowledgeable and educated can sometimes only stand by and watch as forces beyond our control do immense, irreparable damage. At the end of Flow, the animals have reached a safe haven, and formed a society, but it's unclear how long either will last. The greater questions the film has raised—what has happened here? what can be done about it?—remain unanswerable. It may be that the people who come after us will, like the cat, the dog, the lemur, the capybara, and the secretary bird, be left simply to observe the ruins we left them, unable to understand what they meant, or why things got this way.