Flow review: Stunning indie animation oozes with charm and playfulness

In the 24 years since the Oscars have awarded the best animated feature award, Disney/Pixar has won it 15 times, other major Hollywood studios including Dreamworks have taken it six times and Japan’s Studio Ghibli twice.

Never before has the trophy gone to a small, independent production – until this year.

In nabbing the statue, little Latvian underdog Flow became a giant-killer.

Its competition included Pixar’s Inside Out 2, a well-liked feature that held the title of highest grossing animated feature until its $US1.69 billion box office was toppled by Chinese film Ne Zha 2, and Dreamworks’ acclaimed The Wild Robot, which has a 96 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Those two films also had a combined production budget of AUD$439 million.

Flow’s budget was a fraction of that at $6 million, cobbled together from a raft of funding sources.

Its filmmakers, Gints Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, used open-source software Blender for the animation. It features no dialogue and was inspired by French physical comedy master Jacques Tati and Japanese anime. None of these elements scream conventional Oscar winner, and it’s not.

Flow oozes with charm and playfulness, a delightful multi-generational film that captures a quiet grace missing from so many modern animated features obsessed with manic edits, flashing colours and cacophonous sound design. Yes, Trolls World Tour, looking right at you.

There’s a boldness to Flow’s assumption that everyone, even small kids, will be entranced enough by its leisurely paced story that it doesn’t need to compromise by manipulating the audience’s attention. That was correct because you’ll want to be immersed in it.

It takes the time to breathe, to just be in small moments, and revel in the simple pleasures.

Flow takes place in a post-human world but the remnants of people remain in the buildings and the objects left behind. A cat lives in a house in the forest whose former inhabitant had carved small figurines and large statues of the feline.

When the forest begins to flood, the cat jumps aboard a sailboat with a capybara already on board.

The two eye off each other warily but suspicion evolves to companionship. They are later joined by a lemur and its hoard of knick-knacks, a golden retriever and a secretary bird as they traverse the waters together.

The unlikely bedfellows are, by nature, not meant to get on, so there is something tender and beautiful about how they slowly learn to trust each other. It’s a simple philosophy but Flow’s contention that if different animal breeds can form this pack, what’s really stopping humans?

In theory, the absence of humans but not our creations suggests a calamitous, apocalyptic scenario some time ago, but the lushness of Flow’s world is not grim. There are plenty of colourful fish for the cat to catch, a mutated whale who majestically breaches the water, and a deer stampede.

The floods and water surges and recedes as if the Earth and its animals are taking it back from the destruction wrought by humans. The lack of dialogue and language, and the choice to not anthropomorphise its characters, persuasively adds to this argument.

There are also surrealist aspects which enhances the inherent dreaminess in Flow, along with the score composed by Zilbalodis and Rihards Zalupe.

Taken on its own, Flow is a stunning piece of work. But with its wider success story, if this independent film inspires other independent animators to make things that are different, then bring on the future.

Rating: 4/5

Flow is in cinemas on March 20