First of all, Mr. Editor, Sir: can I subtitle two movies as ‘flowy’? Please? No? I can’t? Darn… But this movie is called Flow! And there’s a lot of water in it! I still can’t? Darndest darn… Well, alright then… This, this most FLUID of movies…
So, yeah, for those of you who don’t know it by now: I like animated movies. A lot. And if, by any chance, there are still people out there that think they are all nonsense for the wee ones, I can only say: don’t be silly, you silly person! Not only can children’s movies be watched by people of all ages, but there are also, as I mentioned once or twice before on this website, a great many animated movies that are definitely NOT for children. So, I’m happy to report, I found another one. This one, however, falls in the all-ages category, and it is… well, rather stupid, I’m sorry to say. Right off the bat, the film opens with a cat being chased by dogs, through a forest… running on the ground. Now, I’ve had cats, and any self-respecting feline in that situation would have scaled a tree faster than you could blink an eye. For people who took more than five years to make a movie about a cat, I think that’s… well, let’s stay polite and call it… not so clever, maybe? Anyway…
Did you know that Gints Zilbalodis and Matīss Kažamade made this entire movie on free open source software? I bet you didn’t! I bet you also have no idea who those people are. Well, I didn’t either — but they’re the ones who made this movie. I kid you not.
Plot? Oh yeah, plot… Well, we have a cat wandering through the forests, and then, a great flood comes. Pussy gets swept away and ends up on a boat with a bunch of other animals. And the cute thing here, I guess, is the way all the little animals acted like they were real doggies and real birdies! Aww… And it was also very pretty, and all that. The movie, I mean. There probably was some kind of message in there too. Something about flooding, I guess…? Or be kind to animals, maybe…? I don’t know. And I don’t care! Yeah, I know people went all mushy over it! Me, I don’t do mushy. I’m rock hard. Upright, sincere, and honest. So even if it did win an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a whole bunch of other prizes? They gave Kevin Spacey an Oscar.
Anyway… Did you know that, due to the movie’s popularity in Latvia, the cat from Flow got an actual statue in Riga? True fact! I like that. Suck on that, Garfield. I will leave you now, if I may, with a final little nugget, regarding this movie, I found on Imdb. May it bring a smile to your face, as it did to mine.
“The team was very adamant in getting all of the “voices” to be done by real animals, so they recorded real animals for the movie (The cat’s terrified squeaks during the flood? I have no idea how they recorded that, but my mind immediately conjured an image of the producer and sound engineer drowning the neighbor’s cat in their bathtub). To get the capybara sound, the sound engineer had to travel to a zoo and tickle capybaras. However, the real capybara sounds did not match the personality that the capybara character would have, so, instead, they used a baby camel.”
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