By Jake Wilson
FLOW ★★★½
(G) 85 minutes
It’s been decades since I last played any video games, but Flow brought many of my long-ago memories of the medium rushing back.
In Flow humans are nowhere in sight, but we can deduce they inhabited this world once upon a time.Credit: Madman
The premise of this wordless second feature from the Latvian digital animator Gints Zilbalodis would lend itself to being adapted into a game – which may well occur, given its breakout international success, which culminated recently in an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
The object of the game would be to keep your head above water, which is the primary goal of the main character, a small grey cat with yellow eyes, first seen gazing at its reflection in a stream running through a forest as the sun rises (the movie takes place over a single day, from dawn to dusk).
By mid-morning, the forest will be engulfed by an unexplained flood, forcing the cat to flee to higher ground, and then to hitch a ride on a sailboat where the other oddly assorted crew members include a labrador, a capybara and a lemur.
Humans are nowhere in sight, but we can deduce they inhabited this world once upon a time. None of the animals we meet appear to be capable of building a boat in the first place, much less the massive statues that dot the landscape, suggesting a departed civilisation that worshiped cats as gods.
Flow won the Oscar for best animated feature at this year’s Academy Awards.
Zilbalodis and his team may well sympathise with this point of view, judging by their lovingly accurate portrayal of certain forms of feline behaviour, such as arching the back or crouching submissively when faced with a potential foe, or over-estimating agility and paying the price (there aren’t many actual gags, but I laughed when the cat tried standing on its hind legs and toppled off the side of the boat).
On the other hand, they don’t have the resources of a Hollywood studio like Pixar. They’re content to give us a general impression of fur, rather than animating each individual strand.
Again, this isn’t far from what video games used to look like in the 1990s. In a present-day context the effect is slightly uncanny, simply because it’s no longer the norm.
But this uncanny quality is central to the impact of the film, set in a world close to actual nature in some respects and far away in others, which is visibly computer-generated yet also feels handmade.
This is a rare example of a film that can genuinely be recommended for all ages, including children on their first trip to the movies, who may be especially entranced. While jeopardy is constant, violence and death are absent, and despite the surface realism of much of the animal behaviour, everything remains extremely G-rated.
No doubt, there’s an element of kitsch to Flow, the most idyllic post-apocalyptic movie you’ll ever see. The vision of co-operation between species is somewhat fancifully hopeful, whether we take it literally or as an allegory for how we all need to get along.
On the other hand, we still have room to wonder where all the people went – and in the end, the sun is setting.
Flow is in cinemas from today.
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