ANI-MOVIES, *Flow

Having succeeded in his first full-length animated movie Away, Gints Zilbalodis went on to direct the award-winning Latvian project Straume, known in English under the title Flow. Featuring CGI animation, this film took over five years to complete and was co-produced with assistance from animators in Belgium and France. One of the things about this feature was that there is no spoken dialogue throughout the entire movie as it is entirely populated by animals, and not the singing funny cartoon versions that Disney and Looney Tunes has, making this easy to sell to the international market. Flow was animated in the open-source software Blender, so the movie gives off the impression of an open world video game.

Set in a fantasy version of Earth, a great flood is spreading over probably somewhere in Africa, and all the humans have mysteriously disappeared leaving all the animals free to roam the remaining landscape, or at least as the water keeps rising everywhere. A grey cat runs across some dogs in the forest and loses them to find a giant statue of a cat constructed at the top of a mountain as the tide comes in. The cat gets a lift on a sailboat piloted by a rather smart capybara which is the largest rodent in the world, and encounters a large whale as they also pick up a ring-tailed lemur who is really picky about his basket full of shiny objects. They later pick up one of the dogs from earlier who is very loyal to the cat. A secretary bird befriends the cat, even defending it against his flock whose leader impairs one of its wings leaving the bird to join the crew. All five animals sail their boat to a town submerged which looks like it might have been an island city similar to Venice as they head to a base of giant pillars in the distance. They even pick up the rest of the pack of dogs who were stranded on a high temple. Once they reach the pillars, the cat goes overboard but makes it to the base of one of stone columns and climbs it all the way up to find his bird friend waiting for him where it appears to ascend into the heavens. The cat gained some experience swimming, so he makes it on a glass float from the lemur's collection and wakes up in a new forest where he finds the rest of his crew in the boat dangling from a tree. The remaining dogs chase off after a rabbit while the loyal dog helps the lemur and cat rescue the capybara from falling off a cliff. Afterwards the four of them run across the same whale from before beached in the middle of the woods where they think it dies, even though in a post-credits scene is shown to be still alive somehow.

Flow is a one-of-a-kind movie. It's a huge leap forward from Gints Zilbalodis' Away as it stars all animals. Obviously, these are not regular animals as cats would hate swimming in water, secretary birds wouldn't normally befriend felines, and capybaras are only indigenous to South America which is on the opposite side of the ocean. Flow isn't a violent movie, not even giving into the dog-eat-dog nature that animals would inevitably give into in a drowned landscape marooned on a small boat with other carnivores, so this can be enjoyed by the whole family. This sets a new standard in non-narrative films and how animated features will be done in the future.