Displaying items by tag: Flow movie

FLOW

Latvia, 2024, 85 minutes, Colour.

Directed by Gints Zilbalodis.

The audience is invited to go with the flow, the flow of the narrative, flow of tidal water, suddenly rising up, channelled through ruins of old buildings, moving towards an unknown destination.

Flow won the Academy Award for Best Animation Film, 2024. It also won many other awards around the world, a first for a film from Latvia.

The film took over five years to make, using hand painting and CGI to create extraordinary backgrounds as well as a range of creatures. There is no dialogue so the film is accessible to all audiences, young and old. Not only are the backgrounds beautifully treated, forests and foliage, abandoned ruins, scenes of both beauty and danger, so much of the action is in motion, on the water, the flow, audience admiration for such creativity and dynamism of action.

But there are also the animals. The invitation is to identify with a cat, roaming through fields where there are many statues of cats, but then a group of attacking, dogs. The cat is able to escape onto a passing sailboat, finding a languid capybara as well as a lemur who holds onto a roped cache of precious objects. They are joined by a friendly Labrador, confronted by a large stork-like bird, then joined by the group of dogs. Many adventures as the group continues floating on the flow, a surprising encounter with a whale, the conflict between a group of birds, a group of lemurs unhelpful, the dangers of a steep cliff, the whale beached, shifts in the terrain and the boat caught in a branch. Audiences who come to know the animals and shared their journey will appreciate a tense scene, the cat taking initiative, helped by most of the others, to  a rescue.

With no dialogue at all, audiences are invited to surrender to the images, the beauty, the music, the action. Some audiences might find themselves providing words and phrases for their interpretation of what they see, a journey, a life’s journey, survival journey, an exodus, an Odyssey, an ark… And, with the animals, naming some of the characteristics of friendliness, of ingenuity, of possessiveness, of confrontation, of help, of nobility…

Which means then that this is an animation film of beauty, of challenge, of imagination – and a welcome openness to different interpretations.