Flow – A Wordless Cat’s Tale That Spoke to Me
I didn’t expect to love Flow.
I never do.
And like all things to do with love and connection, life — and cats — have a way of springing into you and staying.
GL said, “You’ll like this one.”
No dialogue.
Just animal and nature sounds, maybe a music score or two.
The cast? All animals.
No humans…”
She was right.
About the no humans part.
GL: No dialogue.
Dory: Meow.
There’s something about silence that says more than words ever can.
FLOW (Flow, Le Chat Qui n’Avait Plus Peur De L’eau)
In Flow, a black cat — solitary, graceful, ever so slightly grumpy (but never cantankerous) — is alone (and prefers it that way).
But not for long.
Soon, his quiet world is disrupted by an overzealous golden retriever — all heart, all noise.
A silly, loud dog who means well, even if he doesn’t quite understand boundaries.
Adrift Together — Flow, A Wordless Journey Of Friendship And Survival | French Film Festival 2025
Some humans never do either.
But then again, isn’t it much easier to love a Golden than a human?
Then everything is swallowed by rising waters.
A sailboat becomes Cat’s reluctant lifeboat.
And slowly, silently, he begins collecting strangers — oddball fellow travelers, the kind you never think you’d journey with, but somehow do.
We don’t always get to choose who we travel with.
Some come crashing in with chaos.
Others slip in quietly and never leave.
The animals don’t speak, so they don’t have names — chided GL.
“Okay,” gulps.
So we call them what we see: Cat. Dog. Bird. Monkey.
Capybara.
That’s how it is in life, isn’t it?
Flow Boat
A chilled-out capybara who sleeps through the storm — whenever, wherever.
That Secretary Bird, with elegance and attitude.
A narcissistic Lemur with a magpie’s eye.
And of course, there’s always a silly, loud Dog who means well.
Watching them, I thought of the people who’ve drifted into my life — some I’ve embraced, others I’ve merely tolerated.
But they’re all here with me, on this sailboat of life.
At least for now.
Maybe I’m the oddball, and no one dares to tell me.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re just a loosely tied community, lacking real friendship, real connection.
But Flow reminds us — even if we don’t understand the ones we happen to travel with, we survive better together.
And maybe, just maybe, we find moments of beauty in the drifting.
There were times I thought the cat had died.
Would die.
“Dieded,” I half-whispered in the dark cinema.
But all cats have nine lives.
And this one — this silent, stubborn protagonist with twitchy whiskers — has the courage to live through all of them.
I recognized myself in him.
Self-sufficient. Stubborn. Resistant to change, yet quietly craving something beyond solitude.
The world in Flow is lush and hauntingly beautiful.
Post-human, maybe.
Full of echoes and overgrowth.
A crumbling house, with a half-finished sculpture.
A soft bed.
The kind of place that once was loved — then abandoned.
Climate change.
Environmental disaster.
Or maybe a world where we didn’t survive COVID-19.
Where only the animals remain.
A flood without warning.
Identities blur.
The world shifts under our feet.
And before we know it, everything we thought was permanent is underwater.
And yet — we float.
Real Life Flow
Flow isn’t trying to be cute.
There’s no talking hippopotamus in the room.
No forced jokes.
Just the sound of wind, water, pawsteps, and the occasional irritated cat chirp.
The oddball crew of creatures searches for higher ground and safety.
It doesn’t explain anything.
The movie trusts you to feel your way through it.
The animation, done entirely in Blender on a modest budget, doesn’t aim for realism.
No, the individual hairs on the animals aren’t perfectly rendered.
But it doesn’t need to be.
Bee, who stumbled upon this mixed stray — with the majestic tail of a Maine Coon.
It glows where it matters — a glint of sunlight, the quiet lurch of a boat.
And, most importantly and unexpectedly, a moment of trust between strangers.
I watched.
I drifted.
I felt.
Sorrow floats — like their little boat.
As suddenly as the waters rose, they receded.
And life flourished again in the valley.
In the end, Flow stayed with me.
Like the odd friendships I never expected.
Meeting Priscilla and Phillip.
Meeting Elia — someone I liked in an instant.
New encounters with the wonderful people from @af_penang — Joel and Michel.
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It shows that strangers, thrown together on the same boat, can become the beginning of a tribe.
Like the silences between people who don’t always know what to say — or who wonder, “Why did they say that, anyway?”
And yet, we let them stay close.
In that quiet narrative, I remember a kind friend who once said,
“We reply, even when the question is strangely awkward — not because we have the perfect answer.
But so the other doesn’t end up speaking into an abyss, alone at the edge.”
After the movie, we started talking as we walked out.
“I’m going to check on my dog.”
“My cat.”
I looked around and quipped, “Capybara?”
We’re all adrift in the same storm.
But sometimes, if we’re lucky, we find ourselves in the same boat with strangers.
We are not alone.
Sometimes, we just need to remember this.
Maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s life.
And maybe — that’s our tribe.
