beyond the douchbaggery of dogs: attentional guideropes and negative worldbuilding in Flow

There is a great deal to be said, I’m sure—by people better informed on such matters than I—about the painterly, almost radiant animation style of Flow, in which the characters and the world seem as much lit from within as from without. The behaviour and movement of the eponymous protagonist is beautifully observed, true to life without being finnicky over the things that “real” cats might do in a given situation, and the golden labrador is frankly as pitch-perfect a representation of the character of that particular breed of dog as one could have asked for.

(Having rather less experience of, say, capybaras, I cannot speak to the accuracy of the other characters, though I remarked to a friend that I had assumed lemurs would be a lot more chaotic-neutral.)

The overall aesthetic seems very much in the high-end lineage of what the gaming world calls “walking simulators”: point and click adventures in which the main appeal is simply soaking up the environment, treating the game as a sort of art installation. Which is to say: the world is the point of such games, as a puzzle to be solved and/or an experience to be had, though usually not as a didactic device. (The latter have become rather more prevalent of late, but then that is not a tendency unique to the medium in question.) The very human instinct to explore and figure things out is activated; the plot may be rather more or rather less than a guiderope to pull the player through the world, but that’s the main point of having one.

Animated moves aimed at a young audience need a plot, of course—not because children don’t have the urge to explore or figure things out (far from it), but because they need that attentional guiderope more than adults do in order to make it through 90 minutes of material, particularly in an actual cinema.

The plot of Flow is fairly standard fare for the medium in some regards (there-and-back-again, plus oddballs-and-outcasts-help-each-other-out) but when you hold it up against the heavy-handed moralising of the implacable Disney empire, it seems daringly mythical, almost taoist in its simplicity. Yes, endearing, perfectly characterised and (crucially) non-anthropomorphic animals are getting along in difficult circumstances, despite their differences—but the absence of any spoken, signifying language puts all the interpretive weight on their actions, instead.

As a result, I was hard pressed not to shout “you fucking douchebag dogs” at a particular moment in the last few minutes of the film, because what happened was so impeccably foreshadowed—again, without any languages other those of the various bodies—that I was furious about it in advance, and apoplectic when it actually came to pass. Thankfully the rest of the audience, most of whom were under the age of seven or so, were spared the sight and sound of an angry Englishman cursing at cartoon characters in a dark room.

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So there’s a guiderope plot to follow, but for those with a little more life experience and/or narratalogical sophistication, there’s also an implicit story embedded in the world in which the guiderope plot is unfolding. It is clear that this world has humans in it… or at least had them, until fairly recently: Flow lives in a little wooden house surrounded by cat sculptures in wood and stone, and which contains not only sketches for said sculptures, but a bed with bedclothes, and other such (rustic, but solid) furnishings.

BUT: Flow accesses the house through a broken bit of a round window above the porch, beneath which the aforementioned unmade bed is placed. Was this always Flow’s home, or did they decide to settle there due to the cat statuary? Did Flow ever have a human owner, or did the artist who lived in the house—along with, perhaps, all the other humans from a world which is still well-supplied with their architecture and ephemera—disappear before Flow got there? Why else would the bed be right next to the broken (and hence certainly drafty) window? If there were people, as it seems there must have been, when did they go, let alone where and why?

And as for the sudden flooding, well, OK—this is where we have to accept that a certain mythological logic is operating, because what seems at first like a tsunami is later shown to be a massive and seemingly universal sea-level increase all over the world. Thus we’re fairly able to accept not only that a capybara might find itself aboard a miraculously functional (if charmingly ramshackle) sailing boat, but also that it might decide to muddle along sociably with not only a cat but also a lemur, an admittedly affable dog and an outcast eagle-heron hybrid, ALL OF WHOM HAVE A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF HOW A BOAT IS STEERED.

(The big bird is demonstrably best at this, presumably because it’s tall enough to see where it’s going while keeping a foot on the tiller.)

But OK: the flood is just your common-or-garden mythical flood. But then why do we see, in the very earliest scenes, a small rowboat stranded high up in a tree, as if left there by exactly the sort of flood which is to come? Are these floods cyclical? Did the first one wash away the humans? But then how come the house where Flow lives was still mostly full of undisturbed human stuff? Who carved the stairways around the ridiculously tall pillars toward which the animals sail in the latter half of the film, who built the little shrines along the way and left prayer-flags strung between the buildings at the base? Why are there no humans even here, at what is presumably the highest point in the world? Why does the injured outcast bird get to do some sort of transcendent beam-me-up thing at the top of these towers, but Flow is left behind to face the waters? How come the flood just suddenly drains away in a matter of minutes, and where does all the water go? Is it going to come back? Why are most dogs assholes, apart from golden labs?

And, most importantly, WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO ABOUT THAT POOR WHALE?

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The obvious answer to all of these questions is “Paul, this is an animated film for children”. My counter-reply would be “sure, but when’s the last time you had a list of questions like this about the world of an animated movie for children?”

I think it quite likely that the animators themselves have no answers for any of these questions, other than “that’s just how we decided it was going to go”. Which is to say: this world was intentional, in that choices were made, but they were not made to a plan, except perhaps as a way of accommodating the next plot beat.

But nonetheless—a world has been built, has it not? That it has quite likely been built as an afterthought or side-effect of the desire to tell a simple story is entirely beside the point.

That this sense of depth and mystery is achieved precisely through what is not shown, not said, however… now that is not beside the point at all.

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