Flow review - come the apocalypse, cue the animals

I so wanted to like Flow. I’d heard good things from usually reliable critic friends who’d seen it already and told me it had enchanted them and their pets.

There’s no dialogue and as real animal calls were apparently used on the soundtrack, I enlisted Lenny the cat to help write the review. He’s been known to prick up his ears and take a well-aimed swipe at a screen if the yowls and miaows are convincing enough. Lenny is particularly happy when David Attenborough serves up suitably small squeaky mammals and chirping birds for his viewing pleasure.

In addition, the story that Gints Zibalodis and Matiss Kaza, the Latvian creators of Flow, had spent five years making the film and used free, open-source software was very appealing in an era when animated films are dominated by the American giants who bankroll vast teams to craft high-budget features. It was one of those heart-warming, David vs Goliath indie cinema moments when the young Latvian duo took not only a Golden Globe but the best animation Oscar, beating out the American studios Pixar, Universal and Dreamworks.

But somehow Flow didn’t work for me, or the cat. Rather than swivelling his ears to check where the yowling was coming from, Lenny carried on licking his arse. I didn’t quite join him in this activity, (I’m not that flexible), but I was equally underwhelmed. As for the story – a lonely cat faced with peril teams up with a motley crew of animals, including a capybara, a lemur, a secretary bird and a dog – well, It’s The Incredible Journey reworked for the umpteenth time. The animals learn to tolerate each others’ quirks while together they brave various threats in a quest for a safe haven. 

The setting has changed: the 1963 Disney original had pets trekking across Canada to reunite with their owners. Here it’s a vague post-apocalyptic setting and in that respect, Flow is reminiscent of the similarly dialogue-free Wall-E. But instead of a dystopia of piled up rubbish, Flow is awash with water sloshing about tsunami style. Various abandoned buildings in states of decay indicate that whatever wiped out people, it happened a while ago. There’s a none-too-subtle Biblical reference with a boat stuck up in a tree. Faintly Mayan ruins give way to quasi-Venetian architecture but location is a bit vague – what continent contains lemurs, deers, capybaras and labradors running free?

We never learn if it was global warming, a pandemic or some mysterious weapon that’s killed off humanity and left the world on the soggy side, while leaving cute animals free to wander the planet. Nothing here is exactly original but familiar stories can still work magic, if they're well told. But to my eye, the animation is unappealing and clunky. It reminded me all too often of an old-skool video game's cutscenes or cinematics. The rendering is occasionally blocky and the artful, visionary backdrops smacked of sub-Studio Ghibli styling.

Maybe if I’d seen it in a cinema packed with fully-engaged children rather than at home with my indifferent cat, I’d have loved it. Or maybe if the film-makers had used the real grunts of capybaras (no shortage to be found on YouTube for fans of that rodent on steroids) rather than dubbing in a baby camel instead, I would have gone with the flow like everyone else…

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