A cat, a dog and a capybara embark on an epic adventure in this earnest and refreshingly unconventional animated film.
“Flow,” an animated adventure film with a touch of magical realism, is a welcome entrant in the cat-movie canon, exuding a profound affection for our four-legged friends.
Its hero, a plucky black cat with round, expressive eyes, doesn’t speak a word of dialogue, and acts more or less like a domestic house cat, but under the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s doting gaze, he’s as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for. Purring, scratching and scrabbling up walls, this cat virtually leaps off the screen.
“Flow,” written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, concerns the cat’s survival during a flood of almost biblical proportions. The story, simple but compelling, unfolds as a kind of feline picaresque, as he clambers aboard a passing sailboat that drifts from one scenic exploit to another. He soon encounters other stranded animals, including a guileless Labrador retriever and a benevolent secretary bird, who tag along to form what eventually resembles a charming, ragtag menagerie. Their adventures together range from hair raising, as when a thunderstorm threatens to capsize their ship, to endearingly mundane, like when a rotund capybara helps a lemur gather a collection of knickknacks.
It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.
Flow
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
