Stunningly beautiful: “Flow”
Photo: rental
Man has disappeared from the surface of the earth, nature recovers. The water rises, the world in which the Latvian animated film “Flow” plays is flooded again and again. A primeval cattle-shaped Wal-reptile hybrid thwarts the waters, the animals now populate the earth alone. Only empty houses and weathered household items remind you that there was something like humanity.
The viewer does not experience what happened in “Flow” – the obvious association with floods is of course climate catastrophe. But that doesn’t matter in this case. From the first minute of films, the magnificent, photo -realistic paintings come back to the center, which not only form the background of history, but how serialized works of art can be seen. You could hang every single picture on the wall as a painting. A very traditional beauty will rarely be found in the history of the animated film. It is no surprise that this film has not only become the most successful Latvian film of all time and prices with massive prices, including the Oscar for the best animated film. A consensus film in the best sense. A criticism that was somehow negative will be searched in vain.
A small black cat moves in these works of art and thus through this world. She is looking for food, flees from a hundred roller or from voracious large white birds and tries to escape the flood that rises again and again. When she succeeds in finding a reasonably secure place with a sailboat, she gets company. First a failed Capybara, then a collective lemura and finally a retriever. Finally, one of the white birds, actually a predator, joins the troops.
Stories are known with such constellations from countless Disney films and so until vomiting: Animals with human properties, skills and problems must exist a number of adventures, all of which serve to form character. “Flow” deviates from this tradition not only by the fact that in it (with an unequal budget than any Disney production) you find more beautiful, because ideas and colors find almost overflowing images, but also with a fundamental look at the animal. The animal heroes here are actually not, so no heroes. They do not speak, but give animal sounds of themselves. And they have no human problems, but very natural: find eating, being eaten, looking for a shelter.
The cat mobilizes all children’s schema, but is quite realistic in their movements and what, albeit sensitive, facial expressions. Albeit extremely strong in the expression. However, this does not make a realistic aesthetics here, but through gentle abstraction. While younger Disney productions in their highly technically tune realism seem rather cramped (or simply seem like a Playstation 5 game), the director and author of Gint’s Zilbalodis manages to create the expression of expression by simplification. On the basis of “Flow” you can once again show a very fundamental paradox of the animated film: the closer the animated image it creates with the means of technology on an in-one trap with reality, the artificial. While the images that, as here, deliberately come from the artificiality of one’s own medium, can touch you much more directly.
In addition, “Flow” keeps discreetly exhausting into the fantastic. The cat can steer the sail of the boat, and in the end the animal gang saves one of them with complex physical considerations before falling into a flood. Nevertheless, nothing is humanized here, the human shine shines through absence in this regard. The animals do not show human behavior.
“Flow” is one of the most immersive films in recent years. His title flow, composed of moving images, engaging music and, above all, colors, forms a suction in which the question of the realism of the pictures no longer really arises. From start to finish you are blown away and feverish with the basic problems: to be drowned – how do you come up where, how do you not fall down, who can you trust and who you can’t? Nevertheless, »Flow« is not suitable as a parabola or even as an allegory. The pictures do not want to mean more than they are, at least not much more: pictures of animals that move through a world without people. And these pictures are of a really stunning, artistic beauty.
»Flow«: Lettland 2024. Regie: Gint Zilbaloodis Buch: Gint Zilbalodis, Matthes Kaža. 88 Min. Jettzt imit.