Flow (Straume)

Director: Gints Zilbalodis

Writers: Matiss Kaza, Gints Zilbalodis

As a kid I loved animation. The kid who any other day of the week couldn't get out of bed before noon would be up at 8am on Saturday mornings for hours of non-stop cartoons. Animation allowed the creators to break the rules of the universe and create wonderous new worlds and situations that appealed to the young me still trying to make sense of a world that didn't.

As I got older and my tastes got more sophisticated I moved on from animation. Those Saturday morning cartoons now seemed simplistic, silly and crudely drawn. Not that there wasn't great animation out there. I just didn't seek it out unless it was truly something special like anything by Pixar or Hayao Miyazaki.

Flow (Straume) has as much in common with those Saturday morning cartoons as Spirited Away does with Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels. At the heart of it its a road movie. A cat loses its home due to a cataclysmic flood that seems to destroy the entire world. As it struggles to survive it comes across other stranded animals along it's journey. They learn. They adapt. They grow. 

The film has no spoken dialogue. The only "dialogue" comes from the sounds you expect animals to make. And that's more than enough to create a truly moving and emotional film. There are two paths the animator could have taken. One is to make animals act like people. The other is to use the behaviors animals engage in to humanize them. Translate those behaviors into emotions that resonate with us. Contrasting Flow with The Wild Robot, which was released this year and is also a very good on it's own merits, and uses the later approach, in my opinion Flow is the better film by using the former. I enjoyed The Wild Robot, but often while watching it I was reminded that I was watching a film that created an artificial world. Things happened on the screen because someone wrote them that way in a script to create a situation that would either amuse or amaze. 

While watching Flow I never got that feeling. It felt natural and real in the context of the world it created. Truly great animation makes you forget that you are watching animation. All films require a degree of suspension of disbelief, but great films make you forget that you are doing it.