Whenever a film critic, especially one who has probably only played a very limited number of games in their life, argues that a film is video-game-like, what they are most likely implying is that the movie they’re reviewing is all show and no substance. Like a video game, it wants to prioritize the purely experiential over providing an experience through narrative. Unlike any video game, however, the film can’t offer the former through another device — joystick, controller, computer — that gives us control over the character and their elaborate gameplay actions. (For the sake of quality video games, films, and, even, video-game-like-films, we’ll ignore Black Mirror: Bandersnatch exists). What it offers instead are filler cut-scenes — often associated with video games featuring rote character drama or (if it’s a Hideo Kojima game) exposition-heavy but ultimately empty world-building — draped inside an annoyingly gimmicky aesthetic (see, or rather don’t see if you’re lucky enough not to have already seen it, Sam Mendes’ 1917).
None of these misgivings apply to Gints Zilbalodis’ meditatively minimalist second feature-length animation film, Flow, even though it’s arguably the most video-game-like-film this casual gamer/film critic has seen. The director has cited “walking simulator” games — like Camp Santo’s Firewatch (2016) and, to a lesser extent, Annapurna Interactive’s Stray (2022) — as key inspirations for his freewheeling style. And it makes complete sense because, like these independent games, Flow prioritizes immersion not through complex gameplay or superfluous narrative mechanics, but through an extreme subtraction of both. It’s a film that, barring an oddly ill-placed dream sequence and ill-disciplined (i.e., rushed) suspense build-up toward its disappointingly high-stakes end, is content to simply follow our courageous cat on a Life of Pi-style adventure after his home is devastated by a great flood. Of course, lessons about the importance of teamwork and tolerance are learned along the way — the film’s middle section sees him struggling to adapt to living on a boat with an eager-to-please dog, a material-obsessed lemur, an accommodating capybara, and a protective bird, as they attempt to find a piece of land not dripping in saltwater — but in execution it’s all far more unconventional than your typical kid-facing animated film.
To this end, and unlike in the aforementioned Life of Pi (2012) or something like The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022), none of this is explicitly explained in the largely silent Flow (which, incidentally, is Latvia’s submission to the upcoming Academy Awards for Best International Feature). It’s mercifully devoid of the annoyingly preachy humans populating the former and the diabetes-inducing, platitude-expounding animals that plague the latter. It’s — quite simply and, hence, most thrillingly — elemental, using its virtuoso virtual camera, usually positioned at “ground level” (think Ozu’s “tatami shots,” but with the camera settling even lower), to naturally convey its life lessons by tracking the changes flowing through our scruffy cat’s body language and incredibly expressive pupil dilations. As Flow‘s black cat gently drifts from one gorgeously rendered 3-D environment into another, it becomes nearly impossible to resist the film’s humble charms and ambivalence toward the supposed requisites of animated filmmaking.
DIRECTOR: Gints Zilbalodis; DISTRIBUTOR: Sideshow/Janus Films; IN THEATERS: November 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 24 min.
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