Arguably the best film of the year, FLOW is a genuine masterpiece.
Directed by Gints Zilbalodis, FLOW is already the Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature and Golden Globes winner for Best Motion Picture – Animated, and the awards and accolades keep amassing. Amo, amas, amat.
An allegory of eminence, FLOW pictures a world seemingly coming to an end. Cat is a solitary animal, but as his home is devastated by a great flood, he finds refuge on a boat populated by various species, and will have to team up with them despite their differences. In the almost flotsam boat sailing through mystical overflowed landscapes, teeming with the vestiges of a human presence, they navigate the challenges and dangers of adapting to this new world.
Visually arresting and riveting, FLOW is non verbal film making at its best.
The observational detail of the animals is beyond compare. Sound mix and effects excellent, score brilliant.
Latvian filmmaker and animator, Gints Zilbalodis, illustrates how animation is not as affected by cultural or language barriers as live action is. It can be much more universal and primal and very exciting visually. Just look.
Cat is caught up in a catastrophe that creates the conflict and send the characters on their path. In FLOW, the flood causes devastation in the natural landscapes.
FLOW wondrously avoids showing animals behaving like humans or have them think the way humans do. Mercifully, they don’t make jokes like the juvenile and jejune characters in so many mainstream, mostly American, animations. The characters’ goals are primal and very simple, it does not mean they are less deep, less significant; it’s simple, not simplistic. Simply brilliant.
In the beginning, Cat is very independent and does not want to be with others. But Cat is physically and metaphorically in the same boat as the dog, the lemur, the bird and the semi aquatic rodent, the sloth tranquil capybara, so all the animals’ personalities are related to this idea the film evokes of society versus the individual.
FLOW is non verbal but not silent. For the sounds effects everything you hear is real animals sounds and the evocative score is by Zilbalodis and Rihards Zaļupe. Gorgeous, exquisite. Go…. With the FLOW.
