This week, I finally got to see the animated film that won best feature for 2024. “Flow” for those who don’t know, (also known as “Straume” in Latvian) is a wordless animated film directed by Gints Zilbalodis, with co-writing and production by Matīss Kaža. Visually, it is lovely. Narrative wise, it follows the adventures of a single black cat surviving in a post-apocalyptic world when the Earth flooded. There are no words.
However, if you watch, you see the Gospel preached at all times without words. The animals rescue the good and the bad. They feed the hungry. At one point, the animals comfort the sick –and dying. They learn from each other, and to some extent, accept each other’s flaws. The creatures work together and even put themselves at risk, sometimes for dubious reasons. They suffer together.
While I did look to see if someone else wrote about this, I kept seeing the corporeal acts of mercy in the scenes. I started keeping track. The cat feeds the hungry and not just herself. The rain falls on the just and unjust, and the animals rescue the lemur despite his hording tendencies and the dogs despite their fecklessness. The bird fights his own flock to spare the cat, and is injured in the process. This is the reality of living the gospel, we are not guaranteed safety, we are commanded to act anyway. The whale rescues the cat at one point, but winds up beached later. Good deeds do not guarantee success or peace or community. The dogs are grateful, but they run away in the crisis when distracted by a rabbit. Community comes from sharing in each others’ sufferings despite their differences. Shared suffering does not guarantee community, but it is part of what allows this disparate group of creatures to have hope, and it is implied, endure.
The film disquiets even as it enchants, because the ending isn’t hopeless but there’s never a moment when there isn’t the possibility of suffering or death. There’s an added scene at the end that indicates hope on a bigger scale, but I won’t give out the spoiler. The story on the whole is one of not merely survival, but the process by which one goes from merely enduring trauma, to suffering with grace. To me, it is also a call to recognize that to survive, we must be resilient as both individuals and as a whole –community, and that we must lean on each other.
All of which brought me back to the constant barrage of news we get every day that seems to indicate all of our government is being sledge hammered. It’s hard to know which way to turn because the ground seems to be constantly shifting. We cannot know what is today, will be here tomorrow, because the administration is perpetually lobbing new cuts, layoffs, buyouts, shutdowns and firings. What we do know is, the laws as we have known them, like the institutions as we have known them, are being eroded from within, and it will take standing up and suffering, to fight what is happening.
The story of the success of Flow is a reminder, we don’t need everything in place to win –Latvia doesn’t have an animation studio –this was a project of love done over five years with an ordinary animation program, a vision, and persistence. The beauty of the work invites us in, the wonder of the story delights as much as the story behind the story itself. That is also the nature of saintliness. Service and love and beauty bring us to the table. We are invited deeper in, and hopefully, we follow that invitation all the way.
I told my students today to think about what sort of feeling they want their readers to have after they finish reading. If the goal is joy, then that should be the end –and it will require suffering to provide relief so that the joy can be understood. For those writers whose endgoal is grief, we must start with joy, because the loss must be felt. Fear must start with safety, or make the desire for security the objective, whether or not it is reached. Revenge must start with something to lose. Beauty, and hope, must bloom in adversity, to be recognized as the true tonics to the fallen nature of the world they are. Writing a story is crafting an invitation to the reader to dive into our mind, to wander through our heart, and hopefully find that theirs resonates.
Tomorrow, I’m asking them to write what they want people to feel from their writing. I look forward to seeing their answers. Maybe I’ll show them Flow first.
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