Enter on Little Cat’s Feet

While immersed in a plethora of film- and TV-writing courses at the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television I had the opportunity to take many on the history of film. This allowed me the pleasure of seeing many silent classics on a big screen. “Silent movies” is, of course, a misnomer. No silent film that could manage it was ever shown in silence. There was almost always at least a piano to accompany the moving images. Regular movie houses featured organs. The biggest road-show productions, like Intolerance and Napoleon, had full orchestras playing music specially written for the film. So, no silence, just no dialogue and, save for the major releases, no sound effects. With the coming of sound on film this all went away.

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Or did it?

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Innumerable non-US animated short films have been produced for decades without dialogue. There are sound effects and music  and sometimes characters mumbling — mumbling being kind of a universal language. No actual words, just wordlike sounds that work equally well for a film produced in France, Italy, or Japan. This eliminates the need for translation. Incoherence equals universality. The smaller the country of origin, the more sense it makes to do the soundtrack of a short film this way. You’re not going to garner much of a worldwide audience for a film made in South Africa if the language is Xhosa. Yes, subtitles are always available, but drawing the eye away from the image on screen to read dialogue or narration is not the best way to fully engage an audience.

Envision, then, doing a contemporary full-length animated film that contains no dialogue, or even mumbling. Music, sound effects, animal noises, but no dialogue. Doing a seven-minute cartoon in this fashion requires the audience to pay full attention all the time. Imagine trying to engage an audience to do it for 85 minutes.

The film is called Flow, and it heralds from that hotbed of animation, Latvia. Released in the US on November 19, that is its actual running time. Director and co-writer Gints Zilbalodis, who also worked on the score, asks the audience to empathize with animal characters who do not speak, are not anthropomorphized, and act in (almost) entirely naturalistic ways.

Along with Dune: Part 2, it is possibly the best film I have seen this year. It’s not just my opinion. The film has already won many international awards and is Latvia’s Oscar entry for Best International Film. Not best animated film: best international film. It is a quiet wonderment; a work of art that has snuck up on the filmgoing public almost entirely thanks to word of mouth. Not being produced by a big studio or even a major independent, there is little money with which to promote it. Yet here it is on the screen for us to marvel at.

‍Flow does not have the visual depth of a Dreamworks film or the slickness of a Disney/Pixar production. What it has is heart and a desire to present us with a fable as opposed to a straightforward story. The main character, a small black cat, is surrounded by a dog, a capybara, a ringtailed lemur, and a secretary bird. All real animals, whose acting is nearly entirely in keeping with their natural selves.

Do not mistake this for a David Attenborough documentary for the BBC. Flow is replete with drama, pathos, humor and some of the most beautiful scenes you will see in an animated film. Short version: in a world from which humans have recently vanished (leaving their works behind), the cat and other animals are caught up in a flood of devastating, biblical proportions. The film is occupied with their survival, as they learn to live with, if not always cooperate with, each other. Again, no dialogue: just music, sound effects, and animals making animal sounds, for 85 minutes. Without a dull minute in the bunch.

There are floods, storms, stampedes, chases, mysterious sculptures and drowned cities, a highly mutated whale and, for good measure, a bit of astral transcendence (maybe the absent humans took that path, who knows?). Everything is shown and nothing is explained. It is joyous, amusing, emotionally wrenching, awe-inspiring — I need to be careful or I will over-praise. And run out of adjectives.

Interestingly, the best animated film (and one of the best films) that I saw in the previous year also featured a cat in the leading role. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish sounds like a cheap follow-up filmed to make a quick buck for the studio (Dreamworks). It is, however, subversively brilliant, and stylistically very different from Flow, made with a much larger budget, but in its own way equally powerful. All I can say is it’s been a feline couple of years.

A last word about Flow when you go: take a box of tissues, you’ll need it.

If you have a cat, take two.