Flow Review

Flow was one of the most hyped animated films of 2024. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and won numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Animated Film. It has finally been released in the UK after a lot of hype.

A little black cat lives and roams the forest. He hunts, avoids a pack of dogs, and sleeps in a cabin surrounded by cat statues. He must fight for survival when a catastrophic flood strikes the forest and the waters continue to rise.

In previous reviews, I have stated my love for cats, so Flow had an immediate appeal. Plus, it offered something different to the usual fare from Hollywood and Japan since it was a Latvian film made on a modest budget of €3.5 million. It was a passion project for its director, Gints Zilbalodis, since it took five years to make.

On the surface, Flow had a simple story since it was about a group of animals trying to survive the flood. It was essentially the all-animal version of Life of Pi as they navigated the watery world. It was a story about a ragtag group needing to learn how to cooperate and become friends. The cat was hostile to the Golden Labrador and the secretarybird, even though they acted as his protectors.

There was a great deal of entertainment in watching these animals interact and observing their unique personalities. The capybara was a loveable curmudgeon, and the easily irritable lemur was possessive of his trinkets. There was an appearance of a group of lemurs who were dressed, and they felt they came from the Madagascar movies. The behaviour of the animals was mostly realistic, which was funny and adorable, such as the cat playing with a beam of light and the golden retriever wanting to play fetch. The animals were in peril, but they weren’t a Watership Down/Animals From Farthing Wood where death and violence were a constant threat.

One of Flow’s most unique features was the lack of dialogue. The animals only communicated through animal noises. They were normal animals, not talking animals or anthropomorphised. This dialogue-free approach made Flow feel like a Disney or Pixar short since it was about actions and visual storytelling. Flow can be compared to Piper and Far from the Tree since they were animal tales.

Flow looked fantastic. Since the film was told from the cat’s perspective so there were a lot of low angles that made the world look even bigger. It was similar to the video game Stray. The animals looked like they came from a video game, and the landscapes and reflections were a marvel to behold.

The use of flood had two bigger meanings: biblical and environmental. The story of a flood evokes ideas of Noah’s Ark since they were stories about animals in boats having to survive and search for land. The flood in Flow also represented climate change since one of the potential impacts is increased with more intense flooding. -There has been a gradual increase in stories about climate change-induced flooding, from big-budget disaster movies (The Day After Tomorrow), magic-realistic stories (Beasts of the Southern Wilds), and post-apocalyptic dramas (The End We Start From). The characters were followed by a whale, and this combined biblical and environmental ideas. Whales have a biblical meaning because a ‘giant fish’ swallowed Jonah, and the whale acted as a watcher and divine force for the party. The whale was mutated, and this raised a question: Why? Was this a result of some sort of environmental disaster or event? In a tweet, Zilbalodis did state the whale initially had a more realistic design but was changed to more mystical.

Flow did set up several mysteries and deliberately left them unanswered. They were signs of human civilisation, but no humans were around. There were also boats in the trees, which hinted that the flood was some sort of cyclical event: it wasn’t the first time it happened, nor was it the last.

Before watching Flow I did immediately think of Stray since they were cat-based stories and shared some environmental themes. That’s where the similarities end. The film adaptation of Stray will probably look to Flow for inspiration. As a cat dad, it was great to see to cats having a time to shine.

Flow was a simple film that had a lot going on in the background. It worked as a cute animal adventure while also acting as a broader story about friendship through adversity and an environmental disaster.