The Year’s Best Animated Movie Feels A Lot Like An Open-World Video Game

I was totally enchanted by Flow
. I expected to like it, as I usually do sitting down to watch something; I hoped to be engaged by it, and maybe to wonder at it. But I wasn’t prepared to be as moved by it as I was. It’s become my favorite animated movie of the year, though I note with interest that it and my two other contenders, Robot Dreams and The Wild Robot, all feel like siblings in a Wittgensteinian family. Flow is the most experimental of the three, and also the most focused.

To explain its gentle magic, I’m going to do something critics usually reserve for tossed-off derision: invoke video games. I thought about video games a lot watching Flow, and that was a key part of how I responded to it. The film seems to call upon the language of them, and not just in the animation, which was rendered entirely in Blender and mixes non-photoreal aesthetics with remarkably accurate animal movement. It’s the world, which straddles the real and unreal, and how we’re placed in it. The effect is that of a tricky balance struck exactly right.

Flow’s Animal World Is The Right Mix Of Reality & Fantasy

This Skillfully Crafted Journey Gets Timing Just Right

Flow is set in a forest, though it’s unclear where on Earth this forest could be — the fauna make that a little complicated. The protagonist is an ordinary black housecat, whose perspective we become closely attuned to. It’s a solitary creature, dodging packs of dogs and predatory secretarybirds, but it was clearly loved once. It takes refuge in an abandoned cabin adorned with more-than-life-size carvings of it in various positions and overlooked by a Mount Rushmore-style carving of it into a mountain.

It’s unclear when the human occupant(s) left, or where they went, but we soon understand why. One day, out of the blue, the forest is overtaken by an enormous flood. The water rises until only the peaks of mountains provide refuge. Our cat, by the skin of its teeth, survives, and it eventually comes across a capybara in a small, weathered sailboat. This vessel gathers a ragtag group of survivors over time, picking up a ring-tailed lemur, a secretarybird, and a yellow Labrador. As they traverse this new world, these strangers must find ways to coexist.

Flow‘s animals are animals, mostly. Physically, they aren’t anthropomorphized, moving and behaving in ways identifiable with their species. The film is dialogue-free, from our perspective at least (though anyone with a cat or dog will understand their vocalizations quite clearly). But they’re also characters, capable of more than acting on instinct. For example, the sail of this little boat is beyond its sailors, but the rudder is not.

The touch of the unreal is light, but the line this movie walks is still quite a challenge. The trick, and where writer-director Gints Zilbalodis displays a real gift, is timing. The animals lean realistic early on, and when the flood came, I thought about our environment and the effect of the crises to come on the natural world. When Zilbalodis wants us to think about more human themes – tribalism, found family, loss – he shows us a cat frantically pushing the rudder to avoid crashing into a tree.

I never felt disconnected from reality, nor did I feel the need to enforce its boundaries. If I ever doubted whether something was “realistic,” a thought that has been taking audiences out of movies since time immemorial, the storyworld was elastic enough to transition me into metaphor without breaking the spell. This is, to some extent, a benefit of animation as a medium, but even the more unreal The Wild Robot leaves you wondering how that island survives with its post-kumbaya ecosystem. What Flow achieves takes real skill.

Flow Channels An Open-World Video Game & Makes It Cinema

Watching It Is A Dance Of Closeness & Distance

When a film is compared to a video game in a review, it’s often to call its artfulness into question. The critic has an issue with the quality of CGI, or even just its prevalence; perhaps the level of violence is objectionable, and the approach to it repetitive and numbing. The movie is too unreal to be felt. They were pushed away by it, rather than drawn in and (ideally) challenged by it.

However disrespectful this may be to video games as an art form, it also gets them fundamentally wrong. Games involve their players, by their very nature. The imagery creates a distance from reality, true – if the things done in games truly looked and felt real, most people would probably run screaming. But players can find themselves immersed in a new, unreal world, one with its own rules and history to be learned through discovery.

Flow is all about managing the push-and-pull of distancing and immersion. It feels, at times, like an open-world game, the camera’s gaze curious and exploratory. With no dialogue to explain itself to us, the film teaches through its details, giving us the responsibility of piecing things together. The cat may not have been playable, but my investment in its journey was similar. Zilbalodis asks us not to spectate, but to share the perspective of this character, to be a passenger on this odd, little lifeboat. I found my experience at this nexus of cinema and video games quite emotional.

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At the same time, this world is not our own. In attuning yourself to it, you adjust to its differences and accept what can happen here that couldn’t in reality, but the design makes clear the film doesn’t wish to smooth over all potential alienation. A little distance encourages us to think about what we’re seeing, not just to feel our way through it, and this movie has a lot to say about making one’s way through a world in crisis. Flow makes us think and feel in equal measure.

It is rare to find a film that speaks so clearly to our current moment with form, as well as content. Don’t let this one slip by you.

Flow releases in US theaters on Friday, November 22. The film is 84 minutes long and is rated PG for peril and thematic elements.

Pros

• Beautiful & innovative animation
• Skillfully draws on the language of video games
• Emotionally involving and ultimately quite moving
• Has a lot to say about navigating a world in crisis