What happened to the people in Flow? The director dropped hints
The wordless animated film by Gints Zilbalodis Current follows a little black cat as he navigates a flood in a post-apocalyptic, seemingly post-human world. The cat finds a boat, meets a large number of different animals and slowly sails with them through the rising water. It’s a thrilling adventure with absolutely stunning animal animation: the creatures experience a whole range of emotions as they navigate this strange desolate world without a hint of dialogue.
There are no people on the screen Currentbut there is evidence that people once lived on this world: houses, boats and other structures. Perhaps most heartbreaking, our feline hero begins his adventure in an abandoned house with a soft bed and cat sketches and images that may be of the black cat himself, suggesting that the cat may have once had a human companion.
Ahead of the film’s December 6 release, Zilbalodis told Polygon that while he hadn’t mapped out exactly where people were going in the world of Currenthe had ‘an idea’ of what was happening to them. But he deliberately left clues and designed the entire environment around the idea that humans were not only once part of this world, but were also aware of the phenomenon of flooding.
“There is a boat in the tree at the beginning of the film (…) to suggest that this is not the first time this flood has happened,” he explains. “It’s kind of a recurring phenomenon. And so my idea was that people were aware of that, or at least had some warning. They probably left somewhere, and they are still somewhere in this world.”
Once the animal gang realizes how a rudder affects the movement of their rickety sailboat, they steer it from place to place, including to a series of towers in the distance. While most of the flooded landscape consists of jungles and forests, they eventually come across an abandoned town. Zilbalodis says the entire city was designed with the idea that people were well aware of the flooding phenomenon.
“There are a number of structures designed to withstand the flood or to bring stuff up,” he said. “These towers, the goal that the characters are going to – there is a certain symbolism about people going there to escape floods and build upward.”
The original idea for Current was a short film Zilbalodis made in high school. In that version there weren’t even any hints about the people. But for the feature film, he wanted to go a step further – not necessarily because he was interested in world-building, but because having interesting architecture for the animal characters to navigate would lend itself to deeper character moments.
“I don’t start with the world,” Zilbalodis said. “I start with the character and the relationships, and then I think about what kind of place would be most appropriate to convey these ideas, and for a conflict to arise where they have to make some decisions , where different characters react in different ways. I start with the character and build the background around that.”
Current is now in wide release after a limited theatrical release in some cities.