Flow
When someone hears that a movie is a computer-animated feature starring a cast of plucky animals who learn to work together to overcome adversity, it’s a reasonable assumption that it’s a Pixar kids’ movie with cutesy humanized animals and a grab-bag of celebrity voice artists, right? In the case of Flow, you’d be wrong on just about every level possible. To start, you’d be on the wrong continent. Flow is the first Academy Award-winning feature produced in the Baltic nation of Latvia, and it is a different animal entirely than the formulaic CGI-animated content Hollywood has accustomed us to.
Created entirely using the open-source animation software Blender, Flow was painstakingly produced over a five-and-a-half year period by Latvian filmmaker and composer Gints Zilbalodis. Clocking in at just under 90 minutes and completely dialogue-free, Zilbalodis describes the film as “an intuitive flow of fantasy,” which is the key to understanding this idiosyncratic, strangely beautiful — and at times, deeply moving — film.
Set in an unspecified time, the world of Flow is one in which the human race has been and gone, leaving nothing but ancient, broken relics behind, while the great cities and monuments of humankind have long since been reclaimed by nature. The film follows a perilous journey taken by a little gray cat who is thrown together with a motley group of other animals, including a guileless dog, a capybara, a secretary bird, and a ring-tailed lemur, as they work together to survive a great flood. However, the film isn’t designed to center the plot; it’s a flow of events in service of the animation itself.
Flow makes no attempt at photo-realistic CGI, and wisely so. The film’s lush forests, overgrown ruins, and tempestuous oceans are drawn in deliberately broad brush strokes, but they are animated with a hyper-realistic vibrancy which lends the film a dream-like quality, reminiscent of an animated impressionist painting.
The film’s animated animals are where it truly dazzles, though. These are not the usual anthropomorphized human stand-ins we’re so used to seeing in animated features. They’re animals behaving exactly as real animals would. The attention to detail in the animals’ movements, particularly the cat’s, are stunningly observed and used to devastating effect. The overwhelming pathos of creatures struggling to survive a cataclysm they can’t understand gives the film a real emotional depth.
Some commentators have chosen to view Flow as a climate change parable, but I would argue that they’re completely missing the point. Flow is one of those incredibly rare films which proceeds from a creative vision so abstract that it transcends the medium itself and exists, not just as a film, but as an avatar of the creative process itself — an art installation in the mind of the viewer.
The mesmerizing sound design, the music (co-written by the director), and the animation are all inextricable parts of a greater whole. It’s obvious that Gints Zilbalodis is emerging as a filmmaker of incredible talent. At only 30 years old, this is his second award-winning animated feature. We can only hope for greater things to come from him in the future. Highly recommended.
A Complete Unknown
If there is such a thing as a definitive history of post-WWII popular music, there are very few figures who deserve an entire chapter to themselves. Robert Allen Zimmerman of Duluth, Minnesota is one such luminary, although he is better known to the world as his self-invented alter ego, Bob Dylan. This louche, guitar-picking, boho kid breezed into New York City one day in 1961 and changed pop music forever.
Emerging from the folk scene of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Dylan’s singular genius came to define the image of the singer-songwriter troubadour, while his epoch-shaping songs began the cultural explosion of the 1960s themselves. Without Dylan, there would have been no Beach Boys, Beatles, Joni Mitchell, or Neil Young — at least, not as we have come to know them. It’s a long list. Elvis Presley may have been present at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, but Dylan was the wellspring of creativity that propelled it into maturity.
What, then, is left to say about the man himself? Famously irascible and notoriously inscrutable, Dylan has remained an impenetrable cypher his entire life, even to those who knew him intimately. Deliberately constructing his public and private personas, it’s almost as if Dylan sees himself as one of his own songs. The closest anyone has come to nailing a big-screen portrait of Dylan is Todd Haynes with his 2007 movie I’m Not There, in which six different actors portray fictionalized aspects of Dylan’s persona, none of which are called Bob Dylan.
Director James Mangold takes a less abstract approach with A Complete Unknown, an ensemble drama based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric! Spanning a four year period from 1961 to 1965, the film opens with 20-year-old Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) hitchhiking into New York City to visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie, who is dying of Huntingdon’s Disease in hospital. Guthrie’s friend, folk singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) happens to be visiting Guthrie too, and takes the young Dylan under his wing after hearing him play a song he composed in honor of Guthrie.
Dylan quickly makes a name for himself in the city’s burgeoning folk scene and is soon signed by Columbia Records. However, this leads to frustration caused by the record company’s restrictions on the material on his first album and the poor sales which follow. And the troubles don’t stop there. Before leaving New York for a lengthy study trip in Europe, Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning) observes, “I realize that I don’t know you.”
Mangold’s film represents a tangential sequel to his 2005 biopic of Johnny Cash, Walk The Line. Cash (Boyd Holbrook) was an early champion of Dylan’s pivot towards rock ‘n’ roll. Mangold doesn’t shy away from the young Dylan’s rampant egotism, his inherent selfishness, or the malign effects of his narcissism on his relationships, conveyed through a note-perfect protean performance by Chalamet. All adolescent swagger and affected aloofness, Chalamet’s Dylan hides his insecurities behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. Dylan’s increasing disaffection with the folk music scene is reflected in a beautifully nuanced performance by Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, with whom Dylan maintained a tempestuous relationship in his early years. A Complete Unknown succeeds both as an insightful portrait and a compelling period drama in its own right.
Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities, Damian is a former freelancer who previously wrote movie and music reviews for a variety of UK websites.
