Flow review – beguiling, Oscar-winning animation is the cat’s whiskers
Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s enchanting eco-fable about a lone moggy in a flooded world is a triumph of imagination over budget
By Wendy Ide
Animation as a medium and fairytales as a subject have always been natural bedfellows. You only need to look at Disney’s princess industrial complex to understand that sparkle-dusted happily-ever-after is big business; that the appetite for this particular breed of magical thinking (plus associated merchandising and sequined tat) is enduringly healthy. But the beguiling, Oscar-winning, dialogue-free Latvian animation Flow, which tells of a solitary cat who must learn to cooperate with a mismatched pack of other species to survive a catastrophic flood, is a little different.
The fairytale here is not the story the picture tells – it’s the story of the film itself. Created by a tiny team with a minuscule budget of about £3m, and rendered entirely on the free open-source 3D software Blender, Flow has been on a journey: its premiere in Cannes; the haul of prizes (54 to date), culminating in the Oscar for best animated feature – that is the stuff of film industry fantasy.
While the limited budget certainly shows on screen at times, it also gave director Gints Zilbalodis a considerable degree of creative freedom. With more money comes compromise and consensus film-making, plus a tendency to spoon-feed the audience rather than challenge them. Flow, however, embraces mystery: we see a disaster unfold in the same way the animals do – with no warning or context.
Zilbalodis has chosen not to explain the recent history of what seems to be a post-apocalyptic but stunningly verdant, geographically unspecified world. There are signs, in the lush forest, of human habitation and the remnants of civilisation. The cat lives in a house that appears to have once been home to a kitty-obsessed sculptor. Feline statues of varying sizes stand like sentinels in the grounds; a half-finished carving still rests on a workbench. But whether the former inhabitant has been relocated or is long since dead – perhaps along with the rest of humanity – is left open to the audience to interpret, and your reading of the background to the story very much depends on how bleakly apocalyptic your worldview is.
The cat’s happy solitude in the abandoned building is interrupted by a sudden environmental disaster: rapidly rising flood waters submerge the house and the forest surrounding it. A last-minute reprieve comes in the shape of a drifting sailboat, but the cat is outraged to discover that the vessel must be shared with another passenger – an unflappable and permanently chilled-out capybara. As the boat drifts, it takes on other creatures: an acquisitive ring-tailed lemur with a weakness for shiny trinkets; a wise but haughty secretarybird; and an excitable goofball of a dog.
One of the most distinctive elements of Zilbalodis’s vision is his decision to let his animals remain animals, instead of attempting to squeeze them into the mould of personhood. The character design and animation of the creatures are where the film’s meagre budget is most evident, and yet behavioural details are minutely observed. The cat – a neat, slinky, self-contained little black moggy – is pure feline, from the insouciantly twitching tip of its tail to its testy chirrup of annoyance (all the animal sounds are real, rather than voice actors cosplaying) at having to share a space with other critters. As an alternative to stamping human personalities on them, Zilbalodis instead encourages us to see elements of ourselves in the animals.
Being a self-taught animator accustomed to working on his own (his previous feature film, Away, was an entirely solo project created on his computer), the director has revealed in interviews that he identifies most with the self-sufficient cat, who must learn to cooperate with others. And anyone with a tendency to hoard accessories and to overpack when travelling will feel a kinship with the lemur.
An eco-parable, Flow is not exactly mining new thematic territory; from Wall-E to Cartoon Saloon’s My Father’s Dragon to The Wild Robot and numerous Studio Ghibli pictures, animated movies dealing with imminent climate collapse are relatively plentiful. However, the approach of Flow, with its animals’-eye, in-the-moment immediacy and its resistance to cutesiness and anthropomorphism, is bracingly fresh and unexpected. The animation, meanwhile, transcends its financial constraints to achieve moments of shimmering, heart-swelling loveliness.
Deliberately enigmatic in approach, with its focus on tiny, cat-level details and a provocative hint that the end of humanity may not be the end of the world, Flow doesn’t hammer home a single message. Other takeaways include the need to work together to survive, the value of adaptability – and that cats will always push stuff off tables given half the chance.
The Call to Return the Statue of Liberty to France, Explained
“The statue is yours, but what it embodies belongs to everyone,” said French politician Raphael Glucksmann in a sharp rebuke of Trump’s attacks on democracy.
By Isa Farfan
A call that could easily have gone unnoticed for the Statue of Liberty to be repatriated to France has generated a media swarm over the sculpture and sparked a war of words between a European Parliament member and the White House press secretary.
Raphaël Glucksmann, one of France’s 79 members of the European Parliament, called for Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty to be returned to its sender, citing President Trump’s allegiance to “tyrants” and gutting of scientific research institutions at a center-left convention on Sunday, March 16.
While it was a passing remark made at a French political event, the comment nonetheless found itself at White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s podium on Tuesday when a reporter asked her head-on whether the infamous gift would be returned.
So will the Statue of Liberty, which has sat in the New York Harbor since October 1886, be uprooted, dismantled, and shipped across the Atlantic back to France?
“Absolutely not,” Leavitt said. “My advice to that unnamed, low-level French politician would be to remind them it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now, so they should be grateful to our great country.”
Responding to Leavitt’s jabs, Glucksmann posted a statement on X, in English, clarifying his calls for the “symbolic” repatriation of the statue.
“No one, of course, will come and steal the Statue of Liberty,” Glucksmann said. “The statue is yours, but what it embodies belongs to everyone. And if the free world no longer interests your government, then we will take up the torch, here in Europe.”
The statue, a fixture of the New York Harbor horizon, was conceived as a gift to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and the abolition of slavery the year prior.
France dug into public funds to construct the statue and Americans fundraised to construct the foundational pedestal through benefit art exhibitions and auctions and a direct call for donations by Joseph Pulitzer in his newspaper, New York World.
The American-funded pedestal is marked by a 1903 bronze plaque inscribed with Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” which imagines the “mighty woman with a torch” declaring: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
However, Glucksmann argues, the United States has strayed from the values the statue’s inscription purports.
“We are counting on you,” Glucksmann wrote.
Source: The Call to Return the Statue of Liberty to France, Explained
‘Emilia Perez’ Songwriter Camille Says “We Don’t Support Hate Speech”
‘Emilia Perez’ songwriter Camille responds to controversy, says we don’t support hate speech or racist speech.
By Ryan Fleming
During an interview with Deadline about her song and score Oscar nominations, (and her) Critics Choice win, Emilia Pérez songwriter Camille expressed relief in being able to talk about the recent controversy surrounding the film.
“It actually feels like a relief to be able to talk about it, and it’s important to talk about these things,” says songwriter Camille. “It’s been very painful for us because you cannot control what other people choose to say, but we don’t support hate speech or racist speech.”
While Emilia Peréz started their Oscar campaign season with a meteoric rise, earning an almost record-breaking 13 nominations, unearthed posts made on X from lead actress Karla Sofia Gascón has halted that momentum. In a recent interview with Deadline, director Jacques Audiard disavowed the actress’ posts and opinions, which Camille says is the opinion of everyone else on the film.
Even amidst a controversy as this, Camille wants to make sure everyone involved in the film gets the recognition they deserve. “We continue this campaign because we all dedicated so much of ourselves and our creativity to this film, and we are so grateful to all the people that have supported us so far. We give all space to that campaign through the last week of meeting people, doing Q&As and being back together in Los Angeles.”
Source: ‘Emilia Perez’ Songwriter Camille Says “We Don’t Support Hate Speech”
‘Dog on Trial’ Review: Zany Courtroom Comedy With a Canine Star Turn
Laetitia Dosch’s ‘Dog on Trial’ delivers what its title promises, but surprises with its tonal swerves and the magnetic presence of its non-human MVP.
By Gut Lodge
Can animals act? Sensible people would say not: Our four-legged friends can’t read a script or construct a character, and if they come across charismatically on screen, that’s simply down to obeying commands, plus the deft touch of an editor. The more whimsically accommodating among us would say those last two points are true of some human actors too; Hitchcock, with his infamous “actors are cattle” quip, suggested as much. Either way, it’s hard to watch Kodi, the ragged, hungry-eyed canine star of “Dog on Trial,” without sensing, whether by sheer good fortune or some mysterious process of empathy, a genuine performance afoot.
Called upon to jump, slump, tremble and even (sort of) sing, with an expressive range spanning untethered aggression and resigned melancholy, the biscuit-colored crossbreed hits every mark required of him by Laetitia Dosch‘s endearingly eccentric directorial debut, and emerges as its most compelling element. On many films, that would seem a slight; in the case of this one, an earnest animal-rights parable in the guise of a broad knockabout farce, it’s surely the intention for this particular dog to have his day. (Rarely has a film seemed so precision-engineered to win the Palme Dog award for best canine performer at Cannes, and sure enough, following “Dog on Trial’s” Un Certain Regard premiere in May, Kodi duly and deservedly took the prize.)
Dosch, the French-Swiss actor who broke through with her delightful star turn in 2017’s “Jeune Femme,” ostensibly plays the lead as Avril, a frazzled, kind-hearted Swiss lawyer with a penchant for hopeless cases, in both the personal and legal sense. This time, unusually, it’s woebegone mongrel Cosmos (Kodi) and his equally hangdog human Dariuch (Belgian actor-comedian François Damiens), who’s facing legal action after Cosmos bit and injured three women. Separate from Dariuch’s debt to the victims, the law states that the dog should be put down. Avril successfully argues that, as an autonomous being, Cosmos should be tried independently, and so “Dog on Trial” proceeds.
This may sound like a premise from a more naïve era of family-friendly Hollywood creature comedies (“Beethoven’s Sixth Amendment,” perhaps), but Dosch’s script, co-written with “My Everything” director Anne-Sophie Bailly, leans hard into the absurdity of the idea while shooting for scathing adult satire. The case escalates fast — as does everything in a frenetic, incident-crammed film, clocking in at just 80 minutes — into a national cause célèbre, inspiring rowdy public demonstrations for and against Cosmos’s right to live, while a procession of professed experts weigh in on the morality and soul of the common mutt. Much of this is witty, as Dosch’s exuberant, up-for-anything direction dips into animation and faux-documentary stylings to convey the barrelling rush of a media circus, while there’s some considered philosophical reflection on animal behavior and ethics amid all the hijinks.
At times, however, “Dog on Trial’s” brash, busy approach leashes its impact. It’s top-heavy with story for such a slender-framed work, as sketchily developed strands involving Avril’s colleagues and her lonely young neighbor jostle for screen time with the more substantial and immediately relevant subplot of the lawyer’s growing attachment to Cosmos’s charming, court-appointed handler Marc (a winning Jean-Pascal Zadi), and the mistreated animal’s gradual softening under his care. Any dog lover will be thoroughly disarmed by this development, and by Kodi’s irresistible enactment of this arc. But they’ll be vulnerable to the next of the film’s emphatic tonal lurches, as its zanier storytelling impulses ran into some sense of duty to the realities of Switzerland’s legal system.
Consider it the shaggy misfit in the litter of recent French-language legal studies, from “Anatomy of a Fall” to “The Goldman Case” — for all its hectic tragicomic slaloming, “Dog on Trial” ultimately takes the shape of a procedural, interested in how justice is determined, and for whom. Dosch is, as ever, an appealingly off-kilter presence before the camera; behind it, she doesn’t have complete control over her film’s wriggling ideas and restless formal execution. Yet there’s something quite suitably untamed about it too. Knowing not all viewers will be on its side, “Dog on Trial” throws its lot in with the animals, barking and clawing and occasionally behaving badly to make its point — and generously throwing the spotlight on its hairier hero to bring that home.
Source: ‘Dog on Trial’ Review: Zany Courtroom Comedy With a Canine Star Turn
Telepathic amplifier. Paris, 1920s
Pas De Merde 