Gints Zilbalodis and the wonder of animals
It’s quite possible that the reason Gintz Zilbalodis’s critically acclaimed animation, Flow (2024), is so incredibly moving is that it’s about a lonely cat. There might just be nothing more heartbreaking than a wide-eyed, forlorn feline fighting impossible odds. The formula might just be that simple. The thought certainly crossed my mind, anyway, as I sat at the back of The Rio Cinema last year as the credits rolled. After all, why else was I sobbing?
Because this is a fairly simple story: it’s basically about a cat battling for survival in a drowned world, with forces intent on its destruction. It encounters a number of other, equally adorable, animals on the course of its journey, and they learn to work as a team despite clashing personalities. And that’s more or less it in terms of plot (apart from the giant, mystical whale which swims through a few key scenes).
And yet, within seconds of meeting Flow’s beguiling protagonist, you’re rooting for this cat as if you’d known it your whole life; it radiates the purity and innocence of Amélie, and displays the courage and grit of John McClane.
Zilbalodis’s animation style is key here. As with Away (2019), his previous feature, the camera swoops and soars to create the sensation of immersive dreamscapes. This orbiting style makes you feel as if you’re floating through his stories, encouraging your imagination to tumble and wander.
Most importantly, Zilbalodis allows the pictures to tell the story. Indeed, Flow is a film about animals, behaving and communicating like animals - never anthropomorphised. And there’s no speech in Away either. But you still feel as if you’re experiencing a script: the characters are communicating, deeply and across a range of emotions. This is the reverse to a lot of conventional cinema and TV, where the story is spoken and images used to reenforce the script - to best serve a distracted modern audience.
Despite the absence of words, Zilbalodis still takes on weighty, difficult themes in his films. Both Flow and Away tackle camaraderie, belonging and courage, with Flow also set on a post-human, earth suffering from catastrophic flooding. Humour is also applied very effectively as a means of making the bonds between his characters feel more real, instead of as light relief. All this means that, despite the otherworldliness of his films, they’re entirely believable.
It’s exciting to think about what his next film might be, for a director seemingly so unencumbered by the pressures of modern filmmaking. One hopes his originality and desire to tell a story which means something has not been tainted by his Oscar-winning fame. With societal collapse and apocalypse becoming near daily news themes, I for one need more films about heroic cats.
