I always joke that “unlikely animal friends” is my favorite genre of mood-enhancing, brain-melting YouTube videos. Show me a sweet little video of ducklings nestling up to a mama cat, or a goat and a dog frolicking on a farm, or a donkey leading a blind horse, and you absolutely have my rapt attention… heart-eyes bursting from my emoji face.
Now, say a black cat, a lemur, a yellow lab, a capybara (!), and a secretarybird (it’s actually spelled with no space!) find themselves as unlikely companions, fighting for survival in a small, battered sailboat during a cataclysmic flood. Has my attention been grabbed? Yes. YES, of course it has! A gorgeous tale that is like The Incredible Journey stirred into a Studio Ghibli palate with stunning state-of-the-art animation, Flow follows these critters in a (refreshingly) wordless adventure as they team up to survive.
Our hero is a black cat whom we meet living in a natural paradise that has presence of humanity, but where all humans seem to have disappeared (for instance, the cat sleeps in the sunny window of a woodcarver’s studio, a homey place that was seemingly quickly abandoned with unfinished carvings and shavings littering the workspace). One day, the cat’s idyllic world is frighteningly interrupted when a roaring flood races through the valley and the forests, sweeping away everything in its path. The cat struggles to keep ahead of the rising waters until it is forced to jump onto a seemingly abandoned sailboat floating by. Little does the cat know, the boat is already occupied.
As stranded critters are picked up one after another, the ragtag crew of previously mentioned unlikely animal friends comes to somewhat of an understanding. No, they are not natural pals in any normal circumstance, but they all can bring special skills to help the group as a whole. Their journey takes them through flooded forests, hills, and cities, and they are faced with some less-friendly foes, some stormy weather, and other challenging scenarios.
The animation in this film is absolutely breathtaking. Rather than paying pixel-like attention to every bristling hair or rustling feather, it’s the unspoken expressions that make the characters fully-formed. Sure, these critters are a bit anthropomorphized, but only to the extent that the cat grumbles at the simplicity of the dog, or the bird gives the cat a thinly-veiled look of disappointment. The capybara sighs and flops over for another nap, the lemur is grabby and possessive of his loot, the cat’s muscles twitch, his pupil’s dilate, and he sometimes mewls or yelps in surprise.
As much as I’m a sucker for little black cats with big eyes, for a film called Flow, the water in this world is the absolute star. The animals are fantastically realized, the mountains and the abandoned cities are mind-blowing, and even the sky gets its moment to shine (literally)… but, wow, the water in Flow is truly a marvel for an animated film. Let the sumptuous visuals wash over you in this glorious film.
