‘Flow’ Movie Review: If You See One Animated Latvian Movie This Year, Make it This One

One of the more agreeable outcomes at this past weekend’s Golden Globes was Flow winning for Best Animated Feature. As of this writing, it’s still playing here in the Valley, at Pollack Cinemas in Tempe and at AMC Ahwatukee 24.

If you see only one Latvian animated movie about a cat this year, make it this one. Directed by young Gints Zilbalodis from a script he wrote with Matiss Kaza, this wordless, dreamlike, almost free-associational feature is possibly the most visually beautiful movie of the year, and it has one of the year’s most vividly drawn heroes, too.

The main character – the title character? I couldn’t be sure; the title (Straume in Latvian) may just refer to the flow of the waters that sweep the characters along – is a small, dark, short-haired cat with wide, perpetually alarmed eyes. The creature wanders an idyllic wooded area alongside a body of water, reflection-gazing and hoping to score a fish from some stray dogs.

Then an enormous flash flood rages through the area. The cat barely makes it to high ground, and eventually takes refuge, as the waters continue to rise, aboard a derelict boat which gathers an inexplicably diverse assortment of other animal refugees from different continents or islands: a patient capybara, a ring-tailed lemur with hoarder tendencies, a stern but protective secretary-bird, a playful, irksomely guileless retriever.

It may be a postapocalyptic world through which the craft carries this oddball crew; human habitations appear to be deserted, and a colossal whale that surfaces nearby from time to time seems to be a multi-flippered mutant. Gradually the animals learn to steer the boat a little; they also learn to care and even sacrifice for each other.

If this sounds sentimental and annoyingly anthropomorphic, I can only say that it didn’t feel that way to me. The animal behavior comes across believably, as does their capacity for growth and empathy. If it’s anthropomorphic, it’s about as low-key as anthropomorphism can be, and the subtle yet insistent sense of allegory for the human experience is moving.

Zilbalodis takes Flow into pretty epic and mystical realms in the later acts, yet on another level the movie works as an animal odyssey adventure in the genre of the Incredible Journey films, or Milo & Otis. At the core of it is the sympathetic and admirable pussycat, meowing indignantly at the perils all around, yet facing them with heart and pluck. It’s not to be missed.