The wordless Latvian animated feature Flow scored an upset at this year’s Oscars, beating out heavy hitters like DreamWorks, Pixar, and Aardman for the prize of Best Animated Feature. In awarding a less globally popular film, the Oscars also brought attention to an animated movie that, while not inappropriate for elementary-aged children, doesn’t have quite the same hand-holding and directness of storytelling associated with American animation. Yes, it’s still about animals going on an incredible journey. But they mostly act like real animals, are subject to real-feeling danger, and don’t come to the same neat and lesson-friendly happy endings as their more anthropomorphic counterparts. This means that Flow might leave plenty of kids – and, honestly, adults – with questions at the end of its 90-minute journey. So let’s examine what happens at the end of Flow, and why.
This part is easy, because it’s a pretty simple one, even if the set-up raises plenty of questions. The Earth – or whatever planet the movie takes place on; let’s assume it’s Earth – is flooded and humans are nowhere to be seen. The timeline is uncertain; we see monuments and ruins that could hint at a time well before the present, or possibly (seemingly more likely, given the environmental catastrophes we’re courting) some time in the future. Essentially, we know little more than the cat we follow from near death avoiding floodwaters into a lucky brush with a boat, which is eventually crewed, such as it is, with other refugee animals: a friendly dog, an imposing bird, a sleepy capybara, and a somewhat manic lemur. (Because none of them engage in DreamWorks-style nattering and chattering, none of them seem as manic as any number of other cartoon animals.) The animals do a modicum of steering to try to avoid disaster, but they’re mostly at the mercy of the water’s flow, which takes them through a variety of dangers and adventures. They do settle some animal-world differences along the way, although, again, without the aid of dialogue or egregiously human-like behavior. They’re heightened from real animal behavior by about, let’s say, 25%.
Perhaps the most inscrutable moment of Flow happens somewhat earlier than the actual ending. During a storm, the boat sails through what looks like ruins of an old city. The cat falls out of the boat, swims ashore, and explores the above-water area, eventually climbing to the top of some kind of rock tower, where the bird, who flew out of the boat a little earlier, is also parked, staring up at the sky. Drops of water begin to rise toward the sky, indicating that there’s something going on with the gravity on this peak. Soon the cat and the bird are both being lifted up by some unseen force, as the sky shimmers with an otherworldly glow, looking like a cross between outer space and under water. The swirls form a vortex of sorts, leading to a glowy, sun-like center in the sky, and the bird glides up to meet it. The cat, though, floats slowly back down to terra firma, and watches as the bird continues to float up, disappearing into the sky.
First of all, if you’re coming to a Flow ending explainer, there’s a chance you haven’t seen the movie and you just need to know if a cat or a dog dies. The answer, happily, is no! The cat and dog in Flow do not die. Neither does the capybara or the lemur, for that matter. That said, spoilers from here on out!
The aforementioned sequence where the bird floats into some kind of heavenly light leads into the final stretch of the film: The cat descends from the peak and looks to rejoin the boat, but it’s too far away, and the cat, bobbing in the water on a float, seems perilously close to washing away. But then mysteriously, the waters quickly begin to recede, revealing a forested area underneath. Eventually, the cat finds the other animals (except the bird) – but then runs ahead through the forest, toward a whale that has been beached by the flood waters’ rapid disappearance. The cat looks at the gigantic creature as the dog, capybara, and lemur catch up to the scene. They approach the cat, who is now staring at a puddle. The four animals huddle together and look at their reflections in the water. The film cuts to black.
So let’s address some of the material leading up to the ending: The whale in the film is, unlike the familiar species who form the movie’s central quintet, not a “real” animal – it’s a more stylized whale design, like an alternate-world version of a gigantic sea mammal. The animals encounter a similar creature (maybe the same one?) earlier in the film, just in passing; one is also glimpsed in the movie’s brief post-credits shot, where you can see part of the whale surfacing in the distance, from a water-level-eye-view vantage. Like much of the movie’s setting, the whale looks like something from our world, but can’t be pinpointed to a specific reference point, suggesting a world that has been altered in some way, presumably by environmental disaster.
It seems likely that the mysterious force in the sky that draws the bird into its warm embrace also might have something to do with the receding flood waters; this suggests a kind of divine intervention, but given the movie’s ground-level look at a post-apocalyptic-like scenario, it seems just as likely that it’s a freak occurrence – a lucky break that eases the menace of the flood, though not without cost, as the animals lose their bird friend. (Whether the bird goes up into the vortex willingly or not is left ambiguous.) They also witness the cost of their own (temporary?) safety in seeing the whale, displaced from the protection of the water. These environmental shifts have a cost, even if four of the animals are lucky to escape with their lives and friendship intact.
This leads up to a final shot that takes care to reunite the animals in a single frame (a frame within a frame, even, given the focus on their reflection in a puddle), suggesting that they’re more bonded than the disparate group that came together by chance over the course of the film. Director Gints Zilbalodis has spoken of the movie’s thematic interest in the cat character overcoming fear of the water, and has said that the final shot means to convey both the cat’s progress in overcoming fear, and the lingering fears that remain despite that progress. On a more macro level, the puddle visually suggests the mirror version of the world that can develop through flooding or other disasters. Are the animals staring into a stable future, or one that – like the movie’s environment as experienced by the viewer – looks like their own, but isn’t quite the same?
The uncertainty is part of what makes Flow such a powerful experience, even as it busies itself with the relatively straightforward business of animals trying to swim away from danger. There is beauty in the respite they experience at the end. But nothing, as we’ve seen, is truly permanent.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.