As a film about four-legged creatures on a perilous long-distance sojourn, the Latvian film Flow, which recently won an Oscar, at first brings to mind the Disney classic The Incredible Journey, which used real trained animals as its protagonists. Flow is animated, and, as a friend suggested after I’d seen it, has more in common with the work of Hayao Miyazaki, whose affinity for nature the makers of Flow obviously share if not outright mimic. Though Miyazaki will occasionally include animals that act like people, for the most part he avoids anthropomorphizing his non-human characters, allowing them to express themselves in accordance with actions we would associate with their relative species. The hero of Flow is a housecat whose instinctive behavior is immediately familiar to anyone who has had one as a companion, a presentation that’s intensified by the fact that this nameless feline lives in an abandoned house in a forest surrounded by wooden and stone sculptures of cats, as if it were the muse of an artist who is now gone. And yet the cat returns to the empty house, as if waiting for its companion to return as well.

There are no people in Flow, which takes place after some kind of apocalypse. The land is suddenly inundated, and as the waters rise through the lush vegetation surrounding the house the cat survives as best it can, eventually encountering other animals—a lazy capybara, a mischievous, hoarding lemur, a goofy golden retriever, and a majestic Secretary bird—who form a kind of confederacy of the displaced, steering a broken sailboat among the ruins of civilization that are now mostly underwater. Though the theme that runs through the adventures these non-speaking comrades experience is one of communal dependence and cooperation, the cat is still the central consciousness, and director Gints Zilbalodis infuses the animal with a vivid personality that conflates a cat’s natural curiosity with a distinctive empathy. If humans, through their own selfishness, have destroyed this world, the surviving animals will keep themselves alive by looking out for one another, which may sound anthropomorphic (there are scenes, especially among the secretary bird’s own kind, that indicate non-humans can be selfish as well) but feels credible given what can only be described as the story’s focus on the longing for so-called creature comforts. 

That the characters are self-aware is perhaps the movie’s most striking assertion, since we tend to think of animals as being only present in the moment. Zilbalodis’s color palette and extraordinary use of light and 3D “camera” movement create a state of magic realism that respects these creatures’ inherent, organic being while giving them the opportunity to create their own stories apart from those we usually deign to impose on them, which is what Disney tends to do. Miyazaki uses animals to highlight and contrast his human characters’ relationship to nature. Zilbalodis attempts something similar, but leaves out the human presence. 

Opens March 14 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiys (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Flow home page in Japanese

photo (c) Dream Well Studio. Sacrebleu Productions & Take Five