Go with the ‘Flow’ on a magical, wordless animated adventure
“Flow” — Four stars
A cat, a dog, a ring-tailed lemur, a capybara and a secretary bird walk onto a boat.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
If “Flow” were coming out of one of Hollywood’s major animation studios, you know what you’d be getting: talking animals making wisecracks in the celebrity voices of Kevin Hart, Sofia Vergara and Jon Hamm. Pop-culture references and yesterday’s slang to keep the TikTok kiddies from staring at their phones. Snark. Lots and lots of snark.
“Flow” is from Latvia — yes, Latvia — and it has none of that. It is dreamy, epic, perilous and very beautiful. Best of all, the animals are animals, wordless and concerned mostly with their own safety and their next meal. Yet, forced to get along, they get along and become something more than the sum of their furry, feathery parts. There’s a message here, and the great good grace of “Flow” is that it trusts us enough not to spell it out. Even adults will figure out what’s going on; the kids will be way ahead of them, as they usually are.
“Flow” opens on a cat, whom we will call Cat, a becoming shade of dark gray and apparently quite young. He prowls a landscape of verdant green, distant mountains, deep forest; on the evidence of several giant wooden cat statues and an abandoned workshop, human beings have lived here recently but have vanished with no explanation. Perhaps they were expecting what Cat does not: a giant tsunami that swamps the opening minutes of “Flow” and turns its earthly vistas into a rising sea.
Remember the mid-1990s computer game “Myst”? The world of “Flow” has the same vaguely mythical, untouched sense of visual grandeur — ancient temples, ruined sluiceways, immense stone pillars looming on the far horizon. The animals, by contrast, lack the finely detailed textures of big-studio pixel work; they’re engagingly low-fi, not hyperreal but real. Cat, learning by frightened necessity to swim, finds itself on a wooden boat already colonized by a grunting but accommodating capybara, and they’re soon joined by a trinket-hoarding lemur, a congenitally happy golden retriever and, finally, that secretary bird — a kind of African eagle with the legs of a crane and the attitude of a pharaoh.
These five embark on a water-bound journey that isn’t so much incredible — they’re not returning home to any humans, and, besides, what does “home” even mean when you lack the concept of property? — as it is open-ended, exploratory, bonding. You might quibble with the fact that the animals figure out how to work a rudder and point the boat in the general direction of where they’d like to go, but other than that, the adventure is simply an adventure, one that exerts the kind of spell necessary for rapture. I’m not sure I exhaled once during the entire 84 minutes.
There’s a goal, I guess — those distant pillars — and moments of high-flying drama and underwater danger, many of them experienced by Cat, who goes places in “Flow” that few felines have the luck, bad or good, to go. In the process, Cat becomes bolder, Dog becomes more cautious, Lemur learns to share its trinkets. Capybara stays a capybara, phlegmatic and slightly Zen.
Toward the end, there’s a transfiguration, which remains mystical and which I will not spoil, but I imagine certain children may hold on to it like a riddle waiting to be solved. Finally, there’s the spectacle of different species making room for one another in the eternal Now in which animals exist, taking each disaster and bit of luck as they come. Going with the flow of not just the flood but the rush of life itself, wonder and peril around every corner and all of it richer for not being experienced alone.
The director and co-writer of this magical fable is Gints Zilbalodis, a 30-year-old Latvian animator making his second feature. (The first, 2019’s “Away,” can be rented on Prime Video.) He’s found a talented crew with which to realize his visions — the percussive, melodic score by Zilbalodis and Rihards Zalupe is a special treat — and is clearly following no one’s drummer but his own. May Hollywood never woo him with offers of riches and sequels, and may you experience “Flow” on the biggest screen you can find, with the smallest human of your acquaintance. You both stand to be enchanted.
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Rated PG for peril and thematic elements. 84 minutes.