Flow

You can probably tell from the number of INSTAGRAM and FACEBOOK posts I make which include photographs of our cats that I’m a big cat fan. The three little dudes we have at the moment – MILO, JASPER, and SYD – are great fun to have around. The inevitable downside of being a pet owner is, of course, the loss you feel when they reach the end of the line and they’re no longer with you. We selfishly tend to give far less thought to what might happen to our furry friends if we were the ones who disappeared. FLOW is a beautiful, semi-apocalyptic movie that follows a group of animals as they travel through a collapsing world free of humans. It deservedly won this year’s Oscar for best animated feature. Congratulations to director GINTS ZILBALODIS and his team.

Cat is a solitary animal, but as its home is devastated by a great flood, he finds refuge on a boat populated by various species, and will have to team up with them despite their differences.

I found watching FLOW to be a deeply affecting experience. Granted, that’s likely because the cat we follow throughout the film is a mix of Milo and Syd. I couldn’t help following the story through their eyes – putting one of them in the starring role. I’m sorry if that sounds soppy and over-sentimental. I mention it because the impact the film has is testament to the skill of the filmmakers. The look of the film is stylised yet grounded, with mildly cartoonish animals dropped into lush, photo-realistic backgrounds. However, it’s the animation that truly excels here. The movement of the individual animals is uncannily lifelike, their behaviours easily recognisable.

The story is slender and vague, but that doesn’t matter. You don’t need to impose a traditional narrative structure on a film focusing purely on animal protagonists, because their needs are inevitably different to ours. They’re not focused on any quest or fixated on power and status; they’re not looking for answers or trying to understand why their world has changed so dramatically… they’re simply trying to survive. Animals are, of course, completely unburdened by the things that weigh us humans down. They’re focused on the moment, not on some deadline, goal, or distant point in time. That gives them an enviable freedom. We’re often told to live each day as if it were our last – animals, on the other hand, don’t have the slightest inkling that their time will ever end.

FLOW had quite an impact on me and I wanted to recommend it here. Even if you’re not a cat lover, there’s still plenty to enjoy from this beautiful, wordless film. If nothing else, it shows you how unimportant we humans really are. If we simply disappeared, the rest of the world would likely carry on regardless.

You didn’t ask for it, but here are photographs of our creatures, just because.