So a cat, a dog, a lemur, a secretarybird, and a capybara are on a boat… Flow sounds more like the start of a joke than a Latvian animated Oscar contender. But no joke could equal the epic journey this movie takes us on for 90 ish minutes. The Always Sunny guys will probably get the closest, biggest laugh, finding a way to turn “secretarybird” into an incredible Dee insult.
Flow follows a black cat through a forest, filled with all sorts of animals, including the ones above. After a herd of deer run by, a giant flood rips through the peaceful greenery, and the water slowly rises. The cat has to find ways to survive the rising waters, ending up in a predicament like the beginning of this review.
In any just world, Flow should be getting the Godzilla Minus One treatment on its animation. This movie cost $3.7 million to make. That’s barely a voice star’s salary in the US animated movies. And yet, time and time again, when great ideas and great art work successfully with good entertainers, the results end up more magical than most of the animated movies that came out in 2024 with 100x those budgets. Flow doesn’t have the money to make wonderfully animated animals, so it sort of Rotoshops them like Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 1/2 to make the movie feel like the dream that it is. In addition, they distract the audience with breathtaking background visuals, both of nature, and of decaying intricate man made structures, with gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, and a sequence or two that reinforces the dreaminess. Problem solved! I found myself closing my mouth because of how often it would be left open by what I was viewing onscreen, completely immersed in this cat’s tale, you’re welcome for that one.
Because short of Homeward Bound, Flow is one of the great animal adventures to grace the big screen. The movie is a thinly veiled story about found families, and how dynamics between them work as they learn to live and love each other. While we’re mostly with the cat, it’s not the leader of the animals all the time. The capybara is the chill glue guy, resolving fights and helping the others out while he’s awake, mostly napping along the way. The lemur is almost like a nervous historian, taking care of his saved possessions in a time where the world is destroying everything. But our dog and secretarybird are sneakily the big emotional carriers of flow. The two of them are forced to choose over and over again to stay with their own kind or to stand up to them and stay with their new adopted family. Both the dog and secretarybird make big decisions that shockingly made me well up a bit or cover my mouth at what was happening, the surest sign that the animators and storytellers knew that Flow had something special inside of it.
So in the middle of big flashier animated films, parents, maybe throw Flow on and see what happens? It’ll be nothing like what your kids have seen before, but the story is simple and powerful enough that they might get it, and unlock a new world of movies you can try for them. Plus, all hail the giant, scary, magnificent secretarybirds, and the chill Glen Powelly capybaras!