Yes its the film festival again, no I haven't posted in the year since the last one. Don't you know how busy my days are? I made a wall, if thats an excuse. It's probably not.
Anyway, desperate not to miss a LIFF for one year and slightly buoyed by the news that the dried and picked clean bones of the Bradford Film Festival has actually rattled back into life again - albeit in a much leaner, low-budget form - gives me hope that maybe after several years of general decline things may be looking up.
Flow (Lat) (wiki)
I started with my kids 10th birthday party, which we used as an excuse to take him and some similarly noisy friends to the newly refurbished Hyde Park Picture House to see Flow, the quite lovely new film from Latvia about a cat in a world strangely vacated by humans but still showing signs of their footprints on the world. Cat the cat lives happily in what appears to be his owners old house, experiencing daily hi-jinx with the similarly feral animals living nearby, until a flood of water takes him on a journey across the waves in a handily passing boat occupied by a capybara. As capybaras do, he's pretty relaxed about the new passenger but as they journey together through the echoes of the past, new animals appear that aren't so easy to get on with.
Flow is the project of Gints Zilbalodis over several years after pricking up ears with his debut film Away, which he created pretty much by himself. Flow has a similar look that shows its not from a big budget animation house, yet still looks pretty gorgeous, doing the best it has with a perhaps limited pool of object models. Refreshingly, it sidesteps the goofy route taken by many other films of its type by retaining as much 'animal-ness' to the creatures as possible, minimizing any anthropomorphic behaviour that would lead to, say a pigeon wearing shades that acted like an Italian mafia don. Its hard to remove entirely or there would be little story here other than some animals tearing each other apart for food, but it's pleasingly kept on a tight leash.
This in itself is refreshing and should be applauded. Many has been the animated film in recent times that have just been [american] people but they're animals because kids love animals and theyre wacky because kids love wacky - I'm looking in your general direction, Under the Boardwalk. So to see the animals of Flow acting for the most part like animals would feels like there's a different direction being explored in how filmmakers approach storytelling for a younger audience.
Flow does take a couple of small leaps of faith by the viewer; quite how a cat understands the finer points of how to steer a sailboat after only a few hours onboard is a bit of a stretch; and the biblical levels of water does require a bit of boxing away at the back of your mind just where it came from and how it goes away just as mysteriously. But as a visual spectacle to wow the kids it kept a group of them quiet and agog for a good 90 minutes, and I enjoyed it too. 8
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