DAN WEBSTER:
Tales of animals struggling through perilous odysseys long have been a traditional theme of popular moviemaking. And some of the best among them have been animated features.
True, there are any number of live-action efforts, among them the 1943 feel-good classic Lassie Come Home (starring Roddy McDowall paired with an 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor). And then there’s the three Disney adaptations of Scottish writer Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel The Incredible Journey.
Depending on how you define the term perilous odyssey, the animated films included in this category could range from such productions as the 2005 DreamWorks feature Madagascar to Disney’s 1994 offering The Lion King.
What all these films have in common is the technique of actors giving voice to the animal characters. Disney’s trio of Incredible Journey adaptations do so, ranging from Rex Allen in the original to Michael J. Fox and Sally Field in the latter two. And who can forget Jeremy Irons’ vocal performance as the duplicitous Scar in The Lion King?
Now, though, we have the film Flow, which is among the Golden Globe nominees for Best Animated Motion Picture. And what sets it apart is that, throughout its 84-minute running time, not one word of dialogue is spoken.
Directed and co-written by the Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, Flow shares a lot in common with Zilbalodis’ award winning 2019 film Away (which can be streamed through Amazona Prime). Both utilize the kind of animation common to open-world videogames such as The Legend of Zelda or Minecraft, though Flow feels a lot like the Cyan-produced game-experiences Myst and Riven whereby you, the player, explore an alien world and are invited to follow clues and solve puzzles.
And while the mystery that Away presents is more cryptic, involving as it does a dark presence that stalks a young boy across a desolate landscape, the enigma behind Flow is somewhat more obvious—perhaps, to some extent, grounded in concern over climate change.
Our protagonist this time is an ordinary black cat (whom, for simplicity sake, I will refer to as “he”). While our feline hero appears to live in a house set in a woodsy setting, he is free to roam, dodging packs of dogs, with nary a single human in sight. This, we come to learn, is a world populated solely by animals.
The absence of humankind could be explained by what our protagonist and the animals he ends up teaming with have to face: a sudden flood that submerges all but the world’s tallest peaks.
Our hero cat survives the calamity by chance when he jumps onto a sailboat already inhabited by a capybara (a kind of large rodent). Over time, the two are joined by a ring-tailed lemur, a secretarybird (a kind of long-legged African bird-of-prey) and a rambunctious yellow Labrador Retriever. Together, sometimes separately, the quintet forges on through a strange, waterlogged world that poses one challenge after the next.
The strength of Zilbalodis’ film is his ability to render the animals in a manner that is authentic rather than anything traditionally cartoonish. Our cat never seems less than real, even when he’s doing something distinctly un-catlike, such as sharing food or skindiving for fish.
The same goes for the other animals: the lemur plays with a collection of trinkets, the capybara lumbers around the deck, the secretarybird retains a suitably elegant stance and the Labrador, of course, just romps and plays like any average mutt.
Zilbalodis underscores all their actions with a musical score that is at once mood-enhancing and yet mostly unobtrusive. So, if he gives us no real resolution to the animals’ predicament, plus no particular reason for the flood to have occurred in the first place, none of that really matters. Because what he does put on the screen is simply beautiful, and touching, to watch.
Oh, and by the way, if Flow were an actual videogame, à la Myst, some of us would play it in a second.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.