Already noticed in Cannes in the section A certain look, Flow directed a quadruple at the Annecy festival by winning the jury's prize, that of the audience, the best music and finally the audience. Directed by Gints Zilbalodis and produced by Sacrebleu Productions (Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Currents, My Afghan Family, etc..), this animated film was created by Latvian, Belgian and French artists. Flow embarks upon an animal adventure where the world is suddenly swallowed by the rise of the waters. A small cat will then make an unlikely team with other species. Together, they will combine their strengths and weaknesses in order to overcome finally very superficial differences.
Oh, oh, abandoned captain!
Revoked reading of the myth of Noah's Ark, Flow brings us up to the animal world. The presence of man is hardly suggested by the vestiges of a fallen civilization, which seemed to dedicate a cult to the feline. Every effort is made to avoid our human condition. For this purpose, the camera is always close to the ground in order to get as close as possible to the skin of a quadripede. Natural, these feline movements make us forget about the technical artifices of directing specific to cinema. The seventh Art here seems to borrow a lot from the grammar of the video game, starting with this crazy inaugural race-prosecution carried by a sequence plan of all beauty and a very different 3D from what can be seen in the field. If the movement appears globally fluid, the framerate (although at 24 frames per second) seems very slightly (and voluntarily) sacked in places.
Léo Silly-Pélissier, animation director worked with about twenty people under Blender. He was the one who already explained his artistic approach a year earlier during a Room RADI-RAF 2023. He had already worked on the excellent Unicorn Wars (see our review and Interview) and he signed films with Michel Ocelot (read our Interview). With only about twenty sequences, Flow opts for continuous animation rather than cutting, leaving more space for contemplative immersion. Well known, the movie never went through a storyboard. A huge environment was created by placing virtual cameras inside for live and shoulder staging. We are therefore very close to the methods of video game.
To tell his story Gints Zilbalodis chose a naturalistic graphic style that recalls the cel shading, technique expensive to video game. A wide range of colours seems to have been applied to textures on which brush strokes are guessed, as if each pixel had been hand painted. The floating camera allows all daring while remaining close to its characters. Impressionist music, all in elegance too, recalls the modesty of video game oST Breath of The Wild. A few strings here and there remind a sorry world punctuated by discreet piano notes. Rather than an overwhelming symphony, music operates with delicacy as if it were an integral part of the environmental system while leaving room for silence. It is the symbiosis of image and sound.
Where many animated films seek to anthropomorphize animals, Flow chooses a radically opposite approach as the game already did Stray before him. Animals are systematically recognized and their movements and mimics remain firmly rooted in the animal world. Out of the dialogues, again the communication is systematically non-verbal. Like a silent film, only the expressions of beasts can convey emotion. And that's where Flow manages to pull his pin from the game because it is up to the spectator to guess between the lines the intentions of the animals, while an embryonic interspecies communication develops between these different beasts that everything opposes... unless it is so little... Even without layering the animals on humanized models and without any lines of text, we can read different sensibilities within this unique pack.
Taken by the winds on a frail boat, these climate refugees will have to learn to tame each other. This makeshift arch is the last refuge where a black cat, a crane, a lemur, a capybaras and dogs will lift the big veil towards the unknown. Still moving, the film chooses a linear heading. True tour de force for a film without words and with a simple but never simplistic frame, Flow succeeds in constantly holding the viewer in breath by bringing us back to our most primary instincts.
Like an animal on alert, we find ourselves looking for the least detail of this environment which is full of life and where each encounter first analyses according to a predation report. Fortunately, Flow avoids the pitfall of haze. The world is presented without moral judgment or manicheism. Life is harsh but harshness is an integral part of life. In return, it is also a world of opulence that the disaster left behind. A lost paradise found by the loss of men?
An ecological fable never mever
Undoubtedly, the rise of water certainly reflects our contemporary and legitimate anxieties in the face of the climate catastrophe that is rumbling and whose effects we are increasingly weighing on our daily lives. In this sense, Flow is also an ecological fable that offers to see ecosystems liberated from humans. The climate crisis that one likes to portray too often as a rescue operation of fauna and flora sounds above all the ice of the anthropocene era. The planet will take away whatever happens. On the ruins of the living known and to the detriment of humanity, certainly, but after the flood, « life always finds its way » As old Ian Malcolm would say.
Finally, in a hollow, Flow questions the sinking of humanity and its paradox: the liberation of biodiversity. Even if men were never named, the great catastrophe announced would eventually be a deliverance for the animal and plant world. Flow constantly flirts between the sky and the aquatic world while succeeding in immersing the spectator with his graphic style at the crossroads of watercolour and pastel colours. In his work Looking for lost time, Marcel Proust summed up the morals of Noah's story in the book of Genesis:
« Noah could never see the world so well that of the ark, even though it was closed and dark on the earth. »
It is also the meaning to give to the movie by Gints Zilbalodis that symbolizes this revelation on the screen. Though imprisoned on this frail boat, these once separated beings will learn to live again. In front of the flood, animals end up helping by giving up their differences. The rise of the waters that eventually cover the tops of the trees is a metaphor of the urgency to unite against the chaos that comes. Ode to otherness, Flow est une allégorie réussie sur l’adversité et le vivre-ensemble. Une bouffée d’air frais à une époque où la peur de l’autre est instrumentalisée pour nourrir la division jusqu’à annihiler les conditions mêmes de la vie en communauté.
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