Spoiler alert

I watched this film a couple of months ago and it has stayed with me.

I think there is such an opportunity for deep creativity when you animate your work. You are free to not only write the story but to choose the level of realism down to your very characters and environment. Flow finds a way to tell a story without ever saying a word.

The cat in Flow is an independent character. When we first meet him, he lives in a house that essentially deifies him. There are large statues of cats in the garden, little figurines litter the house, and we can recognise that the cat has some hardcore fans. Yet he is all alone.

Loneliness is about a lack of intimacy and connection – adoration does very little to reach you in such a state. Idealisation does not involve being seen. The cat dreams of being in the center of an encircling stampede of deer. There is an egocentricity there in his isolation. The deer stampede foreshadows the coming deluge in the film but from the cat’s perspective, all bad events lead to him. He is the only one affected.

As the film progresses and the cat slowly lets others in, he comes across a secretary bird. The secretary bird is proud and quite the leader who knows how to make hard decisions and stand up for what they believe in no matter the consequences. When the secretary bird is injured by his own tribe and cast out for protecting the cat, he tries to take charge of the hodge podge of animals who struggle to connect and behave cooperatively on their boat. One night, the secretary bird gives up on connecting and even with the pleading of the cat, decides this world is not for him and he is safer floating away into the ether. The cat, however, goes back into the fray and tries again to connect even with all the messiness that intimacy brings.

Towards the latter parts of the film, the cat becomes surrounded by a whirling pool of fish, a mirror image of the stampede of deer he dreamt about at the start. This time, he’s awake and it’s real. He catches some of the fish to both feed himself and his crewmates. He is no longer isolated but knows how to retain his sense of self at the center whilst also allowing for connection and intimacy.

Although the secretary bird was righteous, he was brittle. To connect is not to be perfect and it beats the price of loneliness. Maybe I watched this film at the right time in my life as I navigate how to reconnect after a period of protective isolation.