First impressions of Flow

Director Gints Zilbalodis and co-writer Matīss Kažathe invite us into an animated vision of a flooded world in which animals reflect the dangers of who we are and the glory of who we can be.

The flood is here.

The Black Cat, having fled the violent advance of a tsunami, worries her way around a cat-lover’s home that seems to have been recently abandoned. The wooded property is full of cat statues, and the attractive upper floor of the home still has canvases of half-sketched cats on the artist’s desk. But the human beings are gone — gone from the property, and seemingly gone from the world. The water is rising. And the cat is beginning to realize that all she could depend on is going to pieces. There may be no high ground high enough to escape the swelling.

In Flow, the enthralling new animated masterpiece by director Gints Zilbalodis and his co-writer Matīss Kažathe, the Black Cat does not speak English. The Black Cat is a Black Cat, not a Disney cartoon. She — I am going to call the cat she, acting on intuition, although the film does not specify gender — is nine tenths a cat as we know cats: wary and watchful, clever and resourceful, solitary and sometimes vain, prone to venturing into predicaments without anticipating the risks. Her physicality is exactly right, making her perhaps the most convincingly lifelike cat in all of animation.

And yet we latch on to this feline so fast that it’s as if we know her situation, or anticipate it. We feel a soulful bond with this cat whose world is crumbling into the irrepressible tide. Flow gives us not a single word we recognize in spoken or written word, but we bond with this cat and her occasional animal companions with an immediate understanding that this is about us.

The Black Cat, looking around in a panic for solid ground, lunges for a passing sailboat and finds herself in the company of a stranger who is different from her in so many ways: a capybara, blunt-nosed and raspy, but, it turns out, easy company and amiable.

Other passengers arrive…