geezer cinema: flow (gints zilbalodis, 2024)

It's nice when a movie gets a lot of almost excessive praise, and then lives up to the hype. Flow is one of those movies. It takes genre standards and then fiddles with them enough to make something new, miraculously resulting in a family movie that isn't forcefully sappy. It's the story of a cat that experiences a flood, with the film showing the efforts of the cat to survive.

Someone working on that movie knows a lot about cats, because the Cat acted as realistically as any movie cat I can remember. Dog lovers might get a similar feel from the Dog, in this case a yellow lab. The underlying message is very quietly expressed: in a disaster, the only way to survive is for disparate types, some enemies of others, to work together.

If I had to identify exactly what makes Flow so special, I'd point to the absence of human-spoken dialogue. I can't imagine this working with a celebrity voice cast. All we hear are the sounds of nature, yet we get the gist of what is happening. This absence of human-spoken dialogue is enormously helpful ... the narrative evolves in what feels like a natural way, without the kind of documentary tricks that in the 50s would turn a wolf or an eagle into a substitute human. The music on the sound track is very effective at leading us through emotional moments. Again speaking as a cat person, the mews of the Cat were heartbreaking at times, and I can't remember the last time I felt so invested in a movie having a happy ending. I simply did not want the Cat to die.

I did find the animation to be touch and go. The settings are gorgeous, but the animals are drawn in some more old-fashioned way, and at times, they looked blockish (the Dog in particular took me back to my Commodore 64 days) . I have a feeling I'll be arguing with myself for years about whether this is better than The Wild Robot or a bit shy of that fine film. (I've changed my mind three times and I only saw Flow last night.) What a pleasurable argument to have.