In “Flow” Interspecies Passengers Sail Through a Spellbinding Apocalyptic Landscape Captained by a Cat
The new animated film “Flow,” about a cat and a motley group of diverse species pitted against the elements, is a visual feast and a surprisingly emotional ride. Surprising because Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis manages to evoke a lot of feeling without anthropomorphizing (or even naming) his cast of characters.
The story centers on the cat’s survival in a post-human world during and after a flood of biblical proportions. The big-eyed feline clambers aboard a drifting sailboat, which is soon filled with other stranded animals: Labrador retriever, lemur, secretary bird, capybara.
Zilbalodis imbues each of these creatures with depth and character without resorting to Disneyesque cutesiness. (The New York Times review describes the cat “as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for.”)
There’s no dialog per se, but the animals do have voices – real, animal voices. “So we recorded a bunch of animals,” Zilbalodis says in a Hollywood Reporter interview, “and our sound designer [Gurwal Coïc-Gallas] recorded his own cat.” (When Gurwal’s usually chatty cat went silent at the sight of a microphone he had to hide microphones all over his house and record it secretly.
Capybaras don’t really speak much, but they make a noise when tickled, so they had a sound guy do that (world’s best job?). But these gentle beasts make a high-pitched yip when tickled, sounding more like an anxious small dog. So they tried out a few other animals until they found a baby camel that yawped appropriately. All the other animal voices are accurate, right down to specific dog breeds.
While these characters move about in a gorgeously rendered environment, the filmmakers do not want audiences merely marvelling about the animation.
“The focus should always be on the creative aspect, on the storytelling and the emotion, rather than the technology,” says Zilbalodis. “Our style is not decoration, it’s really our way of conveying emotion. And I feel that’s what cinema is for. It’s not a tech demo. People go to the cinema to feel something.”
Go see “Flow” and you definitely will.
Photo credit: IMDb
