By Arthur Wills, Fourth Year Liberal Arts
Don’t let the deniers tell you otherwise: we face climate fallout quicker than anyone can comprehend. Although, of course, there is more to the discourse than a literal ‘warming’ of the globe, the existential campaign to save lives often attempts to appeal with a series of digestible – and, I dare say, ‘iconic’ – images.
One such example is a polar bear upon a melting glacier, perhaps tied so geographically to the mythicised North Pole as to remain a tragic but enclosed portrait for most onlookers. But what if the tableaux were replaced with non-Arctic animals? Worse still, an ecosystem that has, so far, stood above a flood of pop(ular) associations? Now, imagine a lush green forest, overcome by an almost unsurmountable tsunami. Imagine man’s two beast friends, cat and dog, along with a capybara, a secretarybird and a ring-tailed lemur – living representations of disparate equator countries – fighting for surface-level survival. And then, if you can, remove mankind from the picture. This is the dramatic canvas of Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow.
Flow (2024) follows a small menagerie of animated creatures as they navigate this newly filled basin of nature from the helm of a felucca-inspired vessel, encountering, as they go by, not only treetops but also the pillars of an apparently post-apocalyptic landscape. The presence – that is, the footprint – of humanity is evident by constructed remnants of an industrial age: various stone monuments, weathered architectural grandeur, abandoned houses and an abundance of boats. But no dead bodies – only echoes, amongst the flourishes of wildlife, are to be uncovered. In this absence of people, our non-anthropomorphised protagonists instead populate the scenes of a film that feels as though it could have been made by anyone – or any organism for that matter – on Earth.
It’s perhaps fitting, then, that Zilbalodis, as the film’s writer, director, producer and score composer, has revealed the visual entirety of Flow was captured using Blender, a free open-source software available to all those with basic computer privilege. And so, in an act of virtual socialism, this story is realised with breathtaking completion. Where the ground-work perhaps lacks textural investment, it is certainly made up for in desperately gorgeous expanses of sky and sunlight, uncanny animal movements (the result of hours of painstaking zoological analysis) and the most meditative, exhaustive study of bodies of water since James Cameron’s indulgence in an Avatar sequel – except the latter had unfathomable access to deep-sea resources that may never see the light of day again. Between Zilbaloidis, co-writer Matīss Kaža and sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas (whose own pet cat provided many meows), more imaginative sonic decisions were made to employ the voice-cast of a baby camel and a tiger – that become interspecies actors in the process – but the most inspired move is Flow’s whale. Redesigned to “look more mythical”, its appearances strike us with dreamlike magic only comparable to its dialogue-free ‘Un Certain Regard’-premiering predecessor The Red Turtle (2016). While Dreamworks lends prestige and drama to the digital otherworldliness of a ‘wild robot’ via Lupita Nyong’o, Flow does so to its whale without words.
That universal appeal allows Flow to glide effortlessly beyond not just linguistic barriers, but also those of age-range recommendation. Whereas its animated contemporaries have either been marketed entirely towards kids, or explicitly for adults, Flow renders its biology timeless and ageless. This is not just a narrative for everyone, but one that should be watched by each and every person anyway.
With the wisdom of Aesop and the ambiguity of Yann Martel, 2024’s most affecting animated offering is ultimately a parable of support: the support of visionary filmmakers, in pursuit of excellence against odds of expense; support of a vibrant art form and the immediate technology that speaks it; the on-screen support displayed between species to keep afloat; and then the leap of faith, perhaps larger than any of Flow’s own executions of creative licence, that would see this vital camaraderie translated onto mankind.
While I initially shared sniggers with fellow moviegoers over the sheer number of consecutive funding schemes, sponsors and distributing houses with logo intros that unfolded before the film’s action like a clown car, my intervening empathy was twofold: first, to think of the administrative difficulties that modest masterpieces like these encounter today before worldwide recognition; and then second, the thought that so many individual entities would greenlight it, with glorious reason, was overwhelming.
Released originally as Straume (thankfully a direct one-word translation) in its native Latvia in August of last year, the 84-minute feature reintroduces Baltic talent to cinema’s most prestigious stages with the gentlest of a new generation. In fact, amidst a sweep of Anglophone nominees in 2025’s Academy Award ceremony (The Wild Robot, Memoir of a Snail, Inside Out 2, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl) Latvia’s finest actually lifted the trophy in the ‘Animated’ category on a budget some 60 times smaller than Pixar’s $200 million for its latest effort.
The crew of Flow were absolutely heralded with a hero’s welcome back in their domestic airport, and a statue commemorating the central feline spirit was already erected in the capital city of Riga this February, ahead of March’s Oscar win. The embodiment of hometown pride, still, does not stand quite so literally tall as the enormous cat-worshipping monoliths to be seen in the first half of Flow’s plot. Zilbalodis’s 2012 short Aqua – about another cat overcoming their fear of water – could present the director himself to be the primary ‘felinophile’. But in relation to Flow, the artistic devotion to cat form we witness surely points urgently to a present-day people similarly stuck in its environmental comfort zone – to an ignorant and self-destructive extent.
It is so important, and refreshing, for a cinematic experience to present its audience with such a documentary-style paradox: at once included essentially by having an intimate view behind the camera’s unblinking lens and excluded from depiction in front of it. It’s almost as though the human race is considered undesirable in the most positive possible future. The final victory of Flow, a passion project half a decade in the making, is that, much like a planet going through post-human growing pains, Gints Zilbalodis and his team can now relax and let nature take its course.
What did you think of Flow?
