Set in an ambiguously located post-human world, this adventurous animation from Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis resembles a riff on Noah’s Ark, as a rag-tag group of critters (cat, dog, capybara, lemur, secretarybird) weather a world-engulfing flood by commandeering a boat and setting a bearing for the highest remaining elevation. How best to approach it - ecological fable? Diluvian allegory? Scrappy underdog hoping to win the hearts of children and adults alike with cute animal hijinks and broad gestures to profundity? If it doesn’t quite pursue its ideas to the depths one might hope for, the sense of wonder and vivid craft on display prove difficult to resist.
Given its skill at portraying the menace and mystery of the world-without-us, it’s to the film’s credit that it mostly resists the lure of cosy anthropomorphism (if you’re willing to believe - as I apparently am - that a capybara could pilot a boat under the right circumstances). Entirely without dialogue, the animations are closely observed yet highly expressive, imbuing the animals with traces of relatable human foible - the fetishistic acquisitiveness of lemurs, the blind exuberance of canine loyalty and egoism - while remaining true to the amoral hurly-burly of the natural world. Particularly effective is the design of the secretarybirds, whose inert avian features somehow heighten their air of prideful self-governance.
It’s also perhaps the best recent example of a film (the likes of Grand Theft Hamlet excepted) leveraging video game aesthetics - blocky rasterized shading, environmental storytelling (not to mention its resemblance to the ubiquitous rising-water mechanic of old-school platformers) - to narrative ends. Like certain classics of the action-adventure genre, Flow bypasses language and literality to immerse us in an imposing, unknowable world.