Flow (2024)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on January 17, 2025

Sometimes, I’ll sit down for a movie and treat it like a Mathletes problem. I’ll pick it apart, searching it for clues like a popcorn-munching Sherlock Holmes. I’ll dig into the dialogue in real time, ponder callbacks to earlier scenes, and light up when the film illuminates some object’s symbolism. This is fun for me—I like puzzling around, even when I know I won’t necessarily arrive at an answer.

 

But other times, I stop and become lost in a story. Whether it’s urgency, romance, or pure filmmaking magic, that intellectual excitement gets shushed out of the way. I “feel” with both approaches, but when I’m thinking, I keep the emotion at bay a bit.

 

I loved watching Flow this weekend because it begged for the former but gripped me with the latter. A feral cat, living peacefully in an abandoned home, gets swept away by an apocalyptic flood. As waters rise, the cat reluctantly seeks refuge in a wobbly sailboat with a docile capybara, a playful Golden Retriever, a possessive lemur, and a stoic, injured crane. Together, they drift in an endless ocean punctuated only by the occasional spire or roof.

 

Unlike in The Wild Robot, another acclaimed animation offering from last year, these animals never speak—not one word of dialogue gets spoken during its runtime. This is a film of gorgeous, often terrifying sound design where we hear feeble mews cast against the crashing roar of a turbulent sea rising to the sky, and that absence of dialogue certainly contributes to what does, in stretches, yield a Zen viewing experience.

 

That stripping of human language does not diminish the humanity in Gints Zilbalodis’ 85-minute feature. These creatures never waver from what resembles animal behavior, but their journey and growth evoke the sorts of community strife and culture clashing that we instantly recognize. There’s a scene of disagreement between two cranes that will feel familiar to anyone who’s spoken up in a hostile room; the lemur might conjure a phone-obsessed person in your life. Zilbalodis packs every episode the cat encounters with stakes that speak beyond the screen—sometimes loudly.

 

These observations have all come after the film, though. Flow is mesmerizing, its not-quite-smooth animation style full of charm, and its story achieves a perfect blend of meditative and harrowing. Comparison to Life of Pi, another celebrated work featuring various animals in a boat, will inevitably find many viewers, but the absence of Sanju Sharma’s human filter leaves us to observe these fierce but delicate creatures against forces laughably beyond their control. Ultimately a moving watch, the film earns emotion without ever reaching for it.

 

I will call Flow an optimistic movie but not a naive one, which hopefully captures the expected vibe for tuning in. Although (spectacularly) animated and starring an adorable feline, Flow has scenes drenched in dread and showing struggles underwater that might upset very young viewers.