Flow
It’s refreshing to watch an animated movie that isn’t hyperkinetic and full of jibber-jabbering. Flow takes it completely in the other direction: it has no dialogue at all and contains many long unbroken takes with a gently floating virtual camera.
The story follows a cat who lives in a land with steadily rising water levels, and apparently abandoned by humanity. The sense of peril as the cat tries to flee from the flood really stressed me out, both because it evokes the threat of climate change, and because of the danger to the character herself. (I thought of the cat as female, but the film does not state this explicitly.) Eventually, she forms a found family with a group of other animals, including a dog and a lemur, and they set out on a mission to find safety.
I enjoyed watching the animals interact with each other. The filmmakers did a great job of balancing their natural animal behaviours with just enough anthropomorphized personality to make them distinct characters. I imagine it would be fun to watch this movie with a kid, because you could have great open-ended conversations about what each of the creatures is thinking or feeling; the movie doesn’t feed you that information, but rewards close observation and empathy.
Flow was produced using open-source software on a small budget. I’m not going to say that it looks as polished as a Pixar movie—there are some flaws in the rendering and character models—but the aesthetic is pleasant to look at, with a soft colour palette and lifelike animation. I think it’s a great lesson in embracing the limitations of your tools and making the best of them.
