A World Beyond Words

On Gints Zilbalodis' 'Flow'

Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Canna, 1923, Oil on canvas

A century ago, all Hollywood knew was silent films. People flocked to the cinemas. Dressed in gowns and tuxes, they treated a night at the movies like a night at the opera. Of course, they had nothing to which to compare it. Perhaps to our bleary, overstimulated eyes, the silent film is as much a quaint relic as the rotary phone or a children’s toy fashioned out of sticks. To the moviegoer of 1925, though, going to the theater to see static photographs transformed into moving images must have seemed as mystical as the thought of flying to the moon.

Recently, I experienced a form of this magic for myself with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I wanted to watch it out of obligation. Could I call myself a cinephile if I skipped over this colossus of cinema history? But I was not expecting much. How could a film without words sustain my attention or stimulate my curiosity? Well, it did. Swells and silences in the score, monumental production design, the expressive faces of talented thespians — all of it coalesced into a stirring depiction of greed, industrialization, and class.

However, Metropolis left me nonplussed. My profession — the medium of this very review — is erected on words. Without language, literature topples. I should not have been so riveted by a film that rendered my area of expertise superfluous. This quasi-crisis was further stoked by my ongoing reading of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, in which he seems to liken Western language to a convenient but oppressive tool, one that strips us of our empathy and deprives us of reaching the depths of emotion. Were those silent films onto something? Did we lose out on something profound when we introduced dialogue to the screen? Don’t get me wrong: words matter. Words breathe life into a blank page. Words are the easiest form of communication. Words are mellifluous. So, why couldn’t I peel my eyes from the screen for the 85 minutes of Flow’s duration? A film not just without words, but also without humans. What could an animated film with a cast of growling, mewling, cawing animals possibly illuminate about the live-action, literate world of Homo sapiens?

When I queued up Flow, I was not expecting to like it. Rather, I was expecting to experience nothing more profound than simple entertainment. Full disclosure: I bear an unwarranted aversion to animated films. My narrow-mindedness has deemed them fodder for children or the parents of young children. (A penchant for animation, however, is not as unsettling as those Disney-obsessed adults, especially those who choose to get married in the company of underpaid workers sweltering under Goofy costumes or chafing in the synthetic frills of princess dresses.) But I was intrigued by Flow for two reasons: its Latvian origins and its lack of dialogue. The idea that this film emerged from a Baltic country the size of West Virginia and is competing with its swollen, big-budget American counterparts is fascinating. A classic underdog tale. What piqued my interest the most, for the reasons recounted above, was the lack of words. Metropolis, at least, had intertitles spliced in with dialogue and narration. How would Flow tell a feature-length story without such ostensibly necessary crutches?

The premise of Flow is straightforward: a flood destroys the home and surrounding forest of a cowardly cat. Displaced and alone, it must seek out the help of other animals to survive in an uncertain world. The cat, true to its nature, is terrified of the water, but also unwilling to collaborate. Here is where the conflict unfolds. Can an individual escape death? Can one person, or creature, recover after being deprived of their home? Can dire situations lead us to unite and to laugh at the pettiness of our differences?

As the water level rises and the cat meows at the desolate horizon, a sailboat manned by a capybara comes to the rescue. The cat jumps aboard. It is far from happy, though, about having to share the vessel with an oversized rodent. What begins as a two-animal crew slowly, and unwittingly, collects new members. The cast of characters is unexpected — who could have thought of putting a capybara and a lemur together? But more importantly, the animals represent distinctive and often opposed archetypes. A languorous, unflappable capybara. A materialistic lemur. An affable dog — breed: golden retriever. (What other breed could be so doltish and good-natured?) An honorable secretary bird. And the skittish, independent cat. We see ourselves in each of these characters. We see the good and the bad of human nature. And perhaps that is the most impressive quality of Flow: these animals are flawed. Like humans, they err and regret, but they also understand their mistakes and grow because of them.

For half of the film, the cat sulks in the shadows. When it toes into the light and stalks the length of the boat, it is not for the purpose of camaraderie. It gazes at the novel surroundings or tracks the fish swimming in the water. Everything else irritates it: the capybara’s incessant napping, the lemur’s bucket of rattling trinkets, the dog’s clumsiness and unshakeable joy, the secretary bird’s authoritarianism. The cat believes that the rest of the animals are weighing it down. It believes that it can fend for itself, even in an environment where it has no bearings.

Over and over again, the cat and its shipmates are helped by the actions of others. The secretary bird sacrifices a wing and is ostracized from its flock to protect the cat. An enormous, prehistoric whale saves the cat from drowning; later, it helps to free the crew’s crashed boat. When the lemur loses its prized glass sphere, the capybara swims to retrieve it. The dog always tries to do right, even if it sometimes results in broken mirrors and unwarranted excitement. We come to realize that this disparate band of animals is linked by the foreignness of their circumstances, drifting along in a world without answers or guidance — not so far off from the inner crises we confront day-to-day. Eventually, the cat realizes it, too. In a scene that elicits a huzzah from the viewer, the cat finally dives into the water to catch fish. A pile accrues on the deck. Dozens of multi-colored, multi-patterned fish. Ready to gorge on the fruits of its labor, the cat stops. It glances around at the rest of its mates: quiet, hungry. And instead of eating, the cat totes a fish to each of its companions.

Besides the endearing characters and the universality of its story, Flow is a visual feast. The animation lacks the hyper-realistic gloss found among its contemporaries. For that, I am grateful. In some ways, it is reminiscent of rotoscope animation. Patches of color shade fur and feathers like dollops of paint on a palette. The forest and the ruins of an ancient city are depicted with transportive attention to detail. Water — the antagonist and a notoriously difficult substance to animate — mesmerizes. Ripples across the surface, reflections of trees and snouts, refractions of sun. Still water and frothy water and torrential water. It bursts through the screen and sweeps you along on its current.

The authenticity is bolstered by the soundscape. Rather than using AI-generated animal noises, the film crew recorded woofs and hisses and pattering paws from real creatures. Even if you can’t tell the difference, aren’t you filled with a sense of wonder knowing that the noises you hear come from living, breathing beings? Films are magic. At their best, they reflect the ingenuity of the creative mind, the ability to replicate on the screen the complexities of life. The spontaneity of human touch imbues cinema with that magic. CGI and the calculations of machines strip it of that sublime quality. Most animation is computer-based — there is no way around it — but Flow surpasses the confines of circuitry and flows into the realm of the tangible, the real, the human.

There is a timelessness to Flow that contributes to the shared experience between its characters and its audience. We are thrust into a world that may or may not be our own, into a time that may or may not be our own. No landmarks or metrics of progress indicate if it’s the distant past or a post-apocalyptic future. As such, our disorientation is akin to the cat’s. Side by side, we’re charting these foreign passages and learning to exist in a strange environment.

After watching the film, I decided to read more about its creator, Gints Zilbalodis. Flow is Zilbalodis’ second feature. His first, Away, is an awe-inspiring feat. In the span of four years — between the ages of 20 and 24 — he wrote, directed, edited, and composed the music for Away (he knew nothing about animating or making music). The best film school? Diving into a project and doing it yourself. Learning on the fly. Comparisons to John Cassavetes and Richard Linklater and Sean Baker — all of whom made or make compelling, insightful films that transcend their limited resources — are natural. They are stories told with unflinching honesty. Stories that recognize the exceptional in the unexceptional. Past art should not inform one’s evaluation of an artist’s current work (but I am not a professional critic, so I suppose that affords me a little leniency). Yet, I found myself even more enamored of Flow after learning about Zilbalodis’ guerrilla-style spirit. More importantly, knowledge of Zilbalodis’ artistic journey tells me that greatness is not manufactured in prestigious schools or through access to high-tech gadgetry. Greatness comes from practice, from devoting oneself wholly to one’s craft. Even better, if you have something worthwhile to say, that triumphs over any amount of money and elaborate technology. Millions of dollars thrown at a superficial story will not result in emotional depth. Perhaps it will look pretty, but that is nothing more than the gloss of the unreal. As a fledgling writer, this provides me great comfort: pursue art for art’s sake, pursue it because you cannot do anything else, and you will create something sincere.

Perhaps I am overlooking flaws because it’s an animated film, because I went in with tempered expectations. Perhaps that was wrong of me — to preemptively dismiss a film as incapable of introspection due to its medium or the simplicity of its story. Often, however, the breadth and intensity of emotion lies in the smallest of details. In the quotidian and the banal.

Words are important. But words are not our sole means of expression. Were that the case, we would not be moved by the sonorous notes of a Mozart sonata or the vivacious colors of a Matisse. In the end, words are one of many tools we possess to delineate meaning. Flow decides to use the language of the body and the language of music. Though we witness emotions portrayed on the snouts and beaks of animated animals, we appreciate the universality of such feelings: fear, greed, anger, grief, remorse, elation.

We may not see human faces or hear human language in Flow, but we encounter the challenges and celebrations of humanity.

Daniella Nichinson is a fiction writer from Philadelphia, where she is an avid tennis player and an old soul. You can find more of her work here.