To the list of the world’s most dazzlingly imaginative animators – America’s Pixar and Laika, Japan’s Studio Ghibli, England’s Aardman, Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon – you can officially add a 30-year-old Latvian with a laptop.
Flow’s Gints Zilbalodis is now a Latvian with a laptop and an Oscar, and boy, is it deserved. His DIY animation, made partly with freely-available open-source software, takes the promises of his eye-catching 2020 debut Away and fulfils it in spellbinding style. A survival epic full of mysteries and magic, it’s an animated epic worthy of Ghibli.
Set in the aftermath of an inexorable, unexplained flood, it follows a small band of animals floating on a small sail boat towards an uncertain future. Its small posse of furry and feathered adventurers include a slinky, inquisitive cat; a ring-tailed lemur; an aloof secretary bird; and the hipster’s mammal of the moment, a capybara.
It’s been ages since anything articulated the spirituality of the natural world as breathtakingly as this
Their voyage is not Disney’s mushy The Incredible Journey redux and there’s no Life of Pi metaphor behind these characters – they behave like animals in a way that speaks to many hours’ studying at the local zoo (in one cheat, the capybara sounds were provided by a baby camel). But Flow still finds behaviourisms that are touchingly relatable. Teamwork, friendship, ingenuity and common interest are themes that run below the surface like one of the mythical whales that occasionally breach the surface with lazy power.
It’s been ages since anything articulated the wonder and spirituality of the natural world as breathtakingly as this. The perils are profound – predators lurk and separation is a constant threat – but nothing is over-dramatised, including the soothing score by Zilbalodis and his co-composer Rihards Zaļupe.
The animation has a fuzzy-around-the-edges quality that swerves CGI gleam in favour of something more textured. Zilbalodis’s camera moves like his whiskered protagonist, prowling through a submerged land of mysterious feline monuments, the legacy of some forgotten civilisation that, like much else, the movie leaves unexplained. The beguiling, magical realist ending lifts the soul without breaking the spell.
I watched it with my seven year-old. Then we watched it again.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Mar 21.