2024
Directed by Gints Zilbalodis
Written by Matiss Kaža and Gints Zilbalodis
One does not necessarily want to be too mean to Flow, perhaps especially when most of the people one knows have professed a love for it, because it is a small little production that's been scraped into existence, evidently mostly on the basis of the kind of commie European film grant that makes the "production company logo" phase of the film run two straight fucking minutes (whereupon Flow, irritatingly enough, just casually launches into its first shot, with no preamble to tell you, "oh, we're actually starting now"); it's the second feature-length film of Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis, after 2019's Away, which generated some buzz and even acclaim, I assume because that one was really just barely scraped into existence, the entire film being basically entirely the product of Zilbalodis himself, and that kind of origin story appeals to people regardless of whether the movie was good or even functional. Flow, anyway, beats the daylights out of Away, in part because this animated feature involved a team of people (albeit not a large one, but also outsourcing to one or more effects animation companies, which makes a really tremendous difference), but I don't know: going back to Away, a miserable Goddamn nothing of a movie that has roughly the same structure (travel across semi-metaphorical, sometimes-imaginative landscape in roughly a straight line using an unaccountably-usable vehicle on a semi-mystical journey), rather confirms the saltiest impressions I got from Flow, which is that Zilbalodis is a dull striver who very desperately wants to be a person who directs animated feature films, without having much in the way of a good answer for why he wants to, just that that's what successful and celebrated creative personalities do. It's a type that has probably always been around, and probably half the hacks in Old Hollywood fit into it, but I feel it's getting commoner and commoner in indie and quasi-indie spaces these days, across the board in live-action and animated cinema alike, filmmakers for whom the paramount desire is "I want to be known as a filmmaker." Naturally, it results in pretty empty filmmaking, though it appears to be relatively easy to hide it, so long as you pitch a film in a pretentious mode that states aloud "behold, I have done an art," because I don't really know how else anybody could look at the outright immense technical and affective deficiencies of Away and decide "this guy needs a bigger canvas," when I'm not sure I'd have hired him to to be a subordinate layout artist at DWA or WDAS or whatever, at least not based on his extremely gross layout decisions in his first feature that decided to marry a level of abstraction bordering on non-representationalism, in service to a film nominally about serene, lonely stillness, with a shakycam algorithm for the "camera" movements.
Flow veils the emptiness far more effectively, and I can more easily come to terms with the significant number of people who love it, for I am, for starters, also a cat person, and Flow makes the very correct and crowd-pleasing decision to trade in Away's unfathomably disgusting human protagonist, and his stupid, soulless, slack-jawed face, for a cute, sleek black cat, while also devoting even a modest amount of time on such a thing as "character animation," inasmuch as the cute, sleek black cat moves in a believable way and has somewhere along the lines of a hundred times as many unique facial expressions. So what we have is an incredible (I'd go so far as to say entirely implausible) journey, undertaken by a cat whom we initially find hanging out in a forest—attempting to fish, getting chased by dogs—that's near the cat's home, an abandoned human house that seems to have been abandoned in a great hurry, but not too long ago since, for one thing, this cat, which is clearly this homeowner's cat, is still alive, which puts a bound of a couple of decades but really more like three or four years, even if the relatively clean interior of the externally-compromised building didn't set a bound of, like, days. Well, that's sufficient to set the scene, or at least it's all the scene-setting we're really going to get—Flow would like to gesture at a post-apocalyptic world—whereupon a great flood comes, which I had initially conceived as some kind of dam failure, but it doesn't matter what it was, and the apocalypse might as well have been the Rapture. (It probably makes the most sense if it were.) All told, it's just a justification for a boat to be floated down the deluge, and for the cat to get on that boat, along with, in turn, a capybara, a ringtailed lemur, a dog (specifically the Labrador retriever previously chasing the cat), and a secretarybird.
I will go ahead and say that this was better before I realized what kind of movie it was actually going to be; with due respect to the many, many people who apparently got a rich emotional experience out of Flow, and found its combination of dream logic and austerity (should I mention that the animals only make animal sounds?) admirable, the keenest feelings I felt in the whole thing are before the flood happens, and it's still actually about a domestic cat trying to persist in a world that's suddenly been undomesticated. (My favorite single beat in the movie is its return to its home, and the way the layout doesn't let us know where exactly the cat is in the house till it hits us with it, and then the way it still snuggles into the bed next to the pillow, as it undoubtedly did when that bed was still occupied by its human.) As for where it goes from there, there's not a novel thing about it, except it's being channeled through a nominally artier sensibility, which means a bunch of allegedly evocative nonsense, winding up with a film about apparently nothing, and if you were to retort that a movie about animals and nature should be "about nothing," I would whoreheartedly agree, except I think that ship sailed with—well—this ship, that the animals increasingly clearly know how to pilot. (They don't even learn! They just already know.)
It therefore achieves the pretty remarkable feat of being a wholly archetypal talking animal cartoon that merely replaces the dialogue with meowing, barking, grunts, chirps, and whatever onomatopoeia correctly communicates "secretarybird." I kept trying to figure out what themes were being pursued or even what story was being told here, and at certain points I sort of perceived "domesticated animals rebuild a pluralistic human-like civilization" (a few vignettes dip their toes into this, suggesting a distaste for monocultures, with that ambiguously semi-divine secretarybird expressing a disapproval for a tribe of just lemurs, and a pack of just dogs, though in the latter case it honestly could just as easily be that the movie doesn't like dogs that much). To the extent it has a throughline, though, it's pretty much simply the text of the movie, you know, the friends one makes along the way.
It is by no means charmless about that! The animals and particularly the cat are likeable, as animals are prone to be, with enough attention paid to them "being animals" (even if they're technology users) that their significant and ever-expanding anthropomorphic qualities, as well as the ease with which they form cross-species relationships (perhaps I'm simply resentful that this fucking cat gets along better with four animals it just met—two of whom would, in other circumstances, eat it—than my pair of cats do with each other after four years), don't feel like total cheats. Probably the modal scene of the movie is the cat having interestingly cute interactions with four other cute or otherwise-cool animals, as they navigate a landscape rendered ineffably strange by a giant flood and have their adventure, sometimes manifesting as merely light scrapes, sometimes manifesting as life-and-death struggle. (I've covered "best single beat," but the duel of good and evil secretarybirds for the life of the cat is pretty incontrovertibly the movie's best whole scene.)
It's possibly a mistake, then, when it bumbles out into entirely different modes, most befuddlingly with the "whale," or at least that's what extrinsic material asks you to call it, though it's some kind of freakishly-overdesigned Miyazaki creature, not of this Earth, and I frankly hate it—it's clearly intended as some benevolent manifestation of the spirit of nature (which is about the only way to explain how a "whale" got into a terrestrial flood), and it's a simply enormous hat on a hat in a movie that already has that, with its secretarybird that's basically Bird Jesus, to the point that its inability to fly, and hence its participation in the adventure, is ensured by being more-or-less crucified by the other secretarybirds. There's a kind of "magic, sometimes" softness to the movie's reality, above and beyond what the scenario already demands, that peaks in effectiveness with that majestic secretarybird's towering presence, and works pretty alright when it's the cat having dream sequences—it works even better when the cat is exploring, with evident wonder in its cat eyes, some very un-catlike spaces, such as the newly-made underwater realm filled with colorful fish snacks—but there's stuff in the movie that I suppose must have hit people sufficiently right to not bug them about it, while bugging me a great deal, a bunch of overt mystical filigree that just feels to me random, or worse than random, like Zilbalodis is plugging in these baroque visuals because that's what he has coldly reasoned will mechanically trigger the thought in his audience, "you are having a mystical cinematic experience now."
That's one of the things that drags this down a lot for me, far more than the fact it's fundamentally a very conventional animated film. I don't even mind that: after all, the power of friendship is awesome, and just because a thousand talking animal cartoons have pursued that theme before doesn't make it not so. But Flow can't be satisfied with that, so it has to strain, and the effect it gives is kind of interesting, not necessarily in a good way; watching it is sort of like peering into an alternate universe where the The Mind's Eye made half a billion dollars, Toy Story bombed, and the medium of CG animation was dominated entirely by New Agey digital psychedelia until somebody eventually decided to try to tack back towards pre-Renaissance Disney narrative cartoons, but knew they had to keep enough ethereal woo to satisfy expectations, the same way modern family animation has to have pop culture quips, and hence that stupid fucking whale god, and, eventually, some sort of entirely asinine stargate sequence, and of course Zilbalodis's very-present, dreamily-meditative electronic score (although honestly the one thing Zilbalodis has been genuinely best at between both his features is his dreamily-meditative electronic scores).
The other thing that drags this down is, I think, less just me being a crabby asshole, or at least it's me being a crabby asshole in a different way, but: this movie looks terrible. Or, rather, it looks terrible in one narrow way that is, unfortunately, maybe the single most important way it could look terrible. In many other respects, it looks kind of great: at least recognizing that Away's incredibly shitty effects animation was not ready for prime time, Zilbalodis very wisely outsourced his water effects animation, so the water in Flow and the refraction of light through the water in Flow (altogether a pretty damned key part of Flow, after all) looks pretty good, often very good; meanwhile, the backgrounds are, in fact, kind of superb, delivered via an "almost photorealistic" sort of approach that works very well, and suffused with a digital film grain, which is maybe a blunt trick but one that pays off handsomely, conjuring a very warm and living vibe for a wet and verdant world reclaimed by nature; and the untethered-camera layouts are kind of terrific, equally adept at generating tension or just patiently exploring the morbid beauty of that world. The animation qua animation is nice, too, everybody clearly having a good sense of how all these different species of animals move or at least how they're going to move in this film (the cat is wonderfully catlike, for example, and the capybara and secretarybird sure seem right, though I admit I don't know if the exceptionally humanlike movement of the lemur is "correct"). The design, anyway, can be great, on the cat and secretarybird especially; the big, almost-glowing, and rather-human-in-their-movement cartoon eyes on the cat are the definition of "acceptable license" and the secretarybird's unplumbable black eyes give it such a tangible otherworldiness that this feeling certainly didn't need to be pushed by any other element of the film. Now, the effects animation that isn't strictly "blocks of water" isn't always excellent—there's a scene where it rains where I kept waiting for the rain to interact with a surface, and that moment never, ever arrives; and the furry animals who get immersed in water and who would take hours to dry never seem to have even gotten wet in the first place—but there are obviously some corners you have to expect will be cut on a project such as this, and you can't ding it too much.
And then there are corners that if you have to cut they call into question the utility of the project as a whole, and if this is the texturing you're going to have to go with for your animal cartoon, maybe you should call the whole thing off: this looks like something's wrong with your Internet connection, the majority of the animals presented as these obscenely ugly globs of color banding in the "sunlight." Basically no mammal in the film looks good, and it's worse the more lightly-colored they are, and I'm sure you noticed from the screenshots I've been interspersing throughout the review, so I probably don't need to continue to hyperbolically describe it, though if it's not coming through in stills, I want you to know that it is, indeed, hyperbolically bad. (And when they open their mouths to yawn and the like, the featureless pink maws that result are truly disgusting.) The cat gets the best of it, so far as the mammals go, possibly in part because the cat is the protagonist and got the most attention, but mostly because the cat is black and therefore winds up the figure most prone to being fully silhouetted. (There are some plants that the animated characters have to interact with that get it startlingly bad.) The secretarybird(s) actually wind up the best overall, however, and as near as I can tell that's because the feather coverings just work better than fur for Zilbalodis's godless approach, the plumage being rendered as individual units (the secretarybird's raised feathers are the most expressive thing in the movie, short of the cat's eyes) so there's something of an automatic texture to them regardless of lighting conditions. For all the outpouring of affection for this movie, I don't perceive a great version of it lurking anywhere beneath what we'll be extravagantly generous and call "a stylistic choice"; but a movie whose aesthetic I never entirely got used to, and spent a lot of its first third audibly remarking to myself how hideous it was, could only barely get to "good" in any circumstance, even if its little adventure is more likeable than not.
Score: 6/10
You probably don't need me to do defend this as it sounds like you've encountered plenty of defenses of it, and most of what I have to say in its favor is subjective. But, hey, guess I am anyways. I don't disagree about the quality of the animation, and I kept wondering if the screener I was watching was just a really low resolution or bad compression or an incomplete render or something, but from your review and Tim's capsule, plus clicking around a 4k stream, I don't think it was. For sure I'm not going to defend the way the animals look, especially the dog which is the only one that truly took me out a few times (I use the phrase "PS3 graphic" to describe mediocre animation sometimes, but this truly looks out of a video game from 10 years ago).
ReplyDeletePersonally, though, I found that most of that didn't detract too much from what worked. It's undoubtedly a better piece of visual storytelling than it is a piece of animation, and that won out for me. It absorbed me into a state of... sorry... flow to the point that I didn't really project too much onto its world. I didn't think of the whale as the spirit of nature. I just thought of it as a strange sea monster in a strange and scary post-human world. I perceived in the back of my mind that the various animals could be a routine theme of working together, or maybe a slightly more sophistical political parable if I squinted, but I honestly just felt sucked into the group and their various personalities. Maybe that means it will replay poorly when I'm consuming it less experientially. My biggest storytelling complaint is that it's a bit too "on rails" -- by the halfway point, I never got scared that the boat and cat would separate until the destination was reached, even with the weird extended sojourn to bird heaven (a scene which made all four of the people in my family tear up, and I can't really articulate why).
I also know that I am very much swayed by the circumstances in which I viewed it, with my family and all of us in a good, receptive mood. My 5 year really doesn't like flood type stuff (the tsunami in The Red Turtle is the most she's been scared by anything she's ever seen), but she loved Flow -- though maybe partially because of that. Like it was the first time either of my kids has ever said "can we watch that again right now?" as the credits started rolling. Warmed my heart seeing her and my 7 year old fall in love with cinema of a more delicate variety than some of the stupider fare they enjoy. It reminded me that simpler, quieter, and more direct movies can win out.
None of that invalidates the colder takes I've read on the film that correctly prescribe some of its severe limitations, not always well hidden. This is a movie I don't really begrudge people shrugging at. (As compared to, say, Puss in Boots 2, which I loved only a little more than this, but would really question the taste of anyone who was left cold by it.) The one remark in this review I'd push back on is your claim that it's "fundamentally a very conventional animated film" -- I guess if you reduce it to its theme and the outline of its scenario, sure, but rendering that without spoken language is pretty radical. People made a big deal when Wall-E had so little dialogue in its first half; this has even less, and yet its ideas are always so intuitive. I found this to be extremely qualitatively distinct from other family animated films due to its lack of dialogue, mostly for the better.
(Incidentally, the critic society I'm a part of nominated this for "Best Film Not in the English Language" which..... uhh... I guess is technically true but definitely not the spirit of that category. "Best Non-North American or English-Language Western European Film" I guess.)
I did not know that Zilbalodis had made another film. I probably would have figured it out as I was writing a review of Flow (which I hope to do at some point), but that's pretty interesting and I might give it a try, though it sounds like there's a reason I haven't heard about it.
For starters, I'm genuinely glad you (and many others) like it--I won't be as happy if it wins an Oscar, but I don't even know what deserves it this year that's likely to be nominated, and I doubt it'll be close to the least-deserving to ever do so (plus the silver lining of such a small-scale production even getting nominated).
DeleteI guess the lack of dialogue makes it distinctive, though the constant animal noises that they seem to vaguely comprehend puts it into Talking Animal Cartoon territory for me. Not that that's terrible--Bambi is still a Talking Animal Cartoon--but Bambi does not and could not operate a sailboat, so if it's not about nature, what is it about? Just some scrapes, I guess, and atmosphere, and sure, that's fine. (As for WALL-E, it feels like it exists in a more silent/pantomime register than this.) Flow does have its kind of a "quasi-sci-fi mystical odyssey" thing going to make it different, but it's a bummer that that post-apocalyptic melancholia tops out (at least for me) in the first five or ten minutes when interacting with the ruins of human civilization is still a meaningful goal of the movie, rather than set-dressing.
I'm unironically impressed with your kids. I don't love this movie, but it's really cool that they have the attention span for something that, as much as I've groused about it being essentially like Oliver & Company or whatever, IS different in its style, and doesn't seem (to me) all that concerned with keeping little kids engaged with it.
As for Away, go for it, but I hated it so very, very much. (Not that it's its worst sin, but talk about "on rails"; it's almost objectively the bad version of this, though we both know one guy who--IDK--who likes it and *not* this, I cannot truly say by what mechanism, it perplexes me. Though I appreciate that he doesn't give Away a pass, at least, and it feels like *everybody* was *determined* to give that movie a pass because of its production history.)