Flow (2024)
A cat’s marvelous adventure
It might be a holiday here in the USA, but that doesn’t mean I get to sit around all day and play. Yeah, be thankful I won’t be pulling horrible rhyming schemes like that all review, it’d probably even annoy me! Anyways, I tried to come up with something that I could tie into either Thanksgiving or the release of the new season of Stranger Things, but after some looking around and thinking I decided to go with something from the backlog and see how it pans out. I remember seeing the trailer for it and thinking it could be a real interesting idea, but I suppose only time will tell. Water levels are rising, but tonight we just go with the Flow.
The concept here is the most interesting part, and also probably what’s going to end up giving me the most difficulty while writing this review thing. Our plot kicks in with the world seemingly devoid of humans, but not their stuff. Run down buildings, boats, and plenty of sculptures exist, but not a homo sapien in sight. Nature seems to be overtaking things, as there is plenty of green everywhere - but there is one little bit of a problem. Water levels are rising - and doing it relatively consistently at that. We follow a cat as our main character - and not some anthropomorphic Zootopia kind of cat, no - just a normal cat. Our story then revolves around this cat on this grand adventure as it tries to survive the rising waters and might just make some friends along the way.
Plot wise it’s pretty straight forward right? Well, except that you won’t really be given any answers to any of the questions you might have. Where did people go? Why’s the water rising so much? Where are we - okay, that one you could make some guesses given the architecture and stuff, but it’s not spelled out! It’s very much a “the treasure is the friends we made along the way” sort of affair over a set story with dialogue and the sort. I guess what I’m saying here is you’ll be best served by going in with an open mind and an active imagination for this little animated story. It isn’t devoid of conflict or character, oddly enough, but it’s going to take you on a ride without telling you where it’s going.
Acting is getting smashed into character this time around, because quite frankly I think it’s kind of hard to distinguish the two in this one. It’s an animated movie, so acting usually would come down to the voice acting - but there are no lines here. Animal sounds? Yeah, we got cat meows and dog barks and apparently a camel standing in for a capybara - but there is no dialogue in the typical sense. No narrator - none of it. The only thing you’ll be getting in terms of acting comes entirely from the animation and what you infer an animal noise would mean. The good news is, it still manages to be relatively engrossing, with animals acting as you would expect (at least in terms of a dog and cat), while also having reactions that make it feel like they are putting forth those real world emotions without being too crazy fantastical - despite the whole world flood 2.0 that seems to be going on.
Cat and dog
Part of it - or rather I guess most of it really - comes down to the animation. They did a dang fine job here animating all the animals and world. While I’m sure a bunch of the water is probably fluid sims or whatnot, they still do plenty enough to sell everything that’s going on and realistically sell the emotions an animal might be having. Be it the cat’s bouncing between terrified, annoyed, or kitten like playfulness or even the way the bird just kind of judgmentally looks at it’s animal comrades. Yes, there’s parts where it seems a tad goofy perhaps - sometimes we don’t really bother animating the dog’s tongue for example, and the animals can have a bit wild knowledge like how the bird is basically an expert boat driver. Really though, for the most part it nails it in animal attitude, which in turn makes them all feel as though they have personalities without straying too far from what the animal would actually have - which is rather true to real like with how we associate actions with meanings from pets.
Now I’m going to say something that’s going to sound like it contradicts itself - are you ready? The movie is beautiful, but also looks like it could have been a game from the PlayStation 2 or Wii. I know, some folks are immediately reacting like “no way that can be beautiful” - but I’m telling you, with the lighting and the scenery some of the shots in this are downright majestic, even though any close look more than assures you that super-realistic hair sims and complete visual immersion wasn’t really the main idea. If you close up look at one of these animals, you might not be convinced the movie looks that good, but when it hits that it’s suddenly very painterly it just kind of clicks in your head and you really start letting yourself get into it. Honestly, I would expect that some might be taken out of it because it doesn’t look super polished on every model, but I think the movie hits what it was aiming for, and it never took me out of it personally but I do always try to play a little devil’s advocate on these instead of just slinging heaps of praise everywhere to make for a more even experience.
Audio is another situation where I get to contradict myself. I mean, yes, there is no line deliveries even though they do use some pretty good and appropriate variety of animal sounds through the flick. Where the contradiction comes in though is the music - I don’t remember any of it by the time credits roll around, but it’s darn good. Rolling back to that painterly visual approach, the music helps emphasize the emotion of the scenes like any good soundtrack would, but it really hits when it’s doing it really brings up the scenes because of it. I don’t know how much of it is just the lack of dialogue distracting the brain and how much is it’s just darn good - but either way I’m here for it. Now, as you should all know if you’ve followed me doing these long enough, I’m a bit of a mental flat line when I watch movies and as I mentioned earlier on, this movie doesn’t explain a lot. It’s easy to follow, but all the openness of the movie leaves a lot of grounds for the thinking person to find stuff that I’m not really looking for when I watch. A few little examples, because even being effectively brain dead I still pick some stuff up - environmental subjects (like extreme weather or perhaps if someone wanted to spin global warming), that classic circle of life stuff. We could also look at it with the same family looks that we could something like fast and furious - even if it’s through circumstance instead of blood, family is family. The power of teamwork could be another thing you fish out of there. I mean really, the power thinkers would have plenty of fun here I think with things not being so blatantly spelled out as in common movies, and probably spend less time than me wondering if that bird just got abducted by aliens.
This would make for an exceptionally weird heist movie.
This was a neat little movie, and I’m thankful I finally got around to it. It’s enjoyable, and although seemingly contradictory in plenty of fields I love the fact that someone took the idea of a movie with no normal dialogue and ran with it to such a successful stint. I mean, surely it isn’t the first no-dialogue movie, but it’s refreshing when you still get plenty of development without a word being said in an age where plenty of film makers feel the only way to get their story across is with over two hours of movie filled with dialogue and talking heads and travel scenes. Not that those are a bad thing - most are usually pretty good - but this little digital animal adventure is certainly a breath of fresh air in the ocean of movies I’ve watched lately, and although there is absolutely no way I’m tying this thing into Stranger Things, I think the big happy hodge-podge family of animals can do just fine putting it in line with Thanksgiving.