Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024)is striking for its lack of spoken dialogue; the filmmakers respected the lived reality of the nonhuman creatures by not imposing on them anthropocentric ideas of spoken narrative. Nonetheless, the story is communicated beautifully, evocatively, and intelligibly to a human audience. This post explores how the use of 3D animation allows for silence in a way that most other narrative forms, like a written novel, struggle to. Further, it proposes an anthropomorphic narrative mode that pushes against the logocentrism of anthropocentric texts that creates space for nonhuman stories that remain intelligible to a human audience. The following GIF of a brief interaction between the characters from the film is used to discuss these ideas.

Figure 1. GIF from Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024) depicting the cat’s annoyance by knocking an item into the boat. GIF made by the author.

Flow entirely rejects the language necessary for a novel that centers lived animal experiences. While the characters of Flow travel through the remnants of a human world, their concerns, desires, relationships, interests, and, significantly, communications are distinctly nonhuman. This representation is arguably only possible in an animated film that can narratively manipulate bodies so characters can communicate sans language. At the same time, to make the animation legible to the human audience, the filmmakers must rely on a form of anthropomorphism.

In his book, Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First Century Fiction (2019), Timothy C. Baker argues that animals are “trapped” in language. His argument is based on the primacy of writing and speaking and the hindrance this logocentrism poses to the narratives of nonhuman beings. Language is the means through which humans differentiate themselves from all other living creatures; thus, our written and spoken texts, like the novels Baker analyzes, serve this project of separation. Simultaneously, humans cannot represent themselves as superior without something or someone to surpass, requiring a return to the animal. “The problem that remains for literary animal studies is that any study of the literary text must inevitably focus on the human representation of nonhuman animals, and in so doing may reinforce the anthropocentric perspective it seeks to question” (Baker 2019: 5). Thus, a scholar arrives at an impasse. Literature is “an inherently human paradigm” that will naturally end up “privileging the human at the expense of any conception of lived animal experience” (Baker 2019: 5). Yet the desire for a more “honest” representation of fellow creatures consistently emerges in literary texts. Baker (2019: 205) concludes: “The novel cannot exceed its boundaries, and yet (…) it can draw attention to them, and encourage the reader to think what might be on the other side”.

Anthropomorphism has become something of “a dirty word,” carrying connotations of too much emotionality, too much trans-species identification, and too much subjectivity as opposed to (supposedly) objective scientific discourse (Taylor 2011: 266). While there are concerns about anthropomorphism going too far and thus denying fellow creatures their own senses of self and existence, anthropomorphism is both something one should and cannot avoid. Nik Taylor points out that “anthropomorphism is a widely accepted cultural practice” whether the scientific community likes it or not (Taylor 2011: 266). However, the anthropomorphism is a form of empathy by inserting oneself into the position of these other creatures and imagining what they could be feeling and thinking. To understand Flow, an anthropomorphic narrative mode is created asks its audience to consider “a wider notion of narrative thinking” to tell non-anthropocentric stories (Russell 2016: 145).

The GIF from Flow shows, without words, how the cat and the lemur do not get along. The lemur’s demanding, selfish, and exuberant behavior irritates the more peaceful and observant cat. The brief interaction expresses the cat’s irritation by relying on an anthropomorphic narrative of irritated and irritant, as well as relying on the audience’s familiarity with cats. Humans usually interpret a cat’s intentional action of knocking something off a shelf as an expression of annoyance. The lemur’s attachment to their basket of trinkets is a running subplot throughout the animated film; thus, the audience can take the cat’s interaction with the lemur’s possessions as a way of expressing their annoyance at the lemur. For a viewer actively resisting an anthropomorphic interpretation, this whole interaction becomes nonsensical; only by accepting that the cat can experience annoyance, that the lemur can be annoying, and that the cat can make intentional actions to express this annoyance does the narrative become legible.


References

Baker, Timothy C. Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Springer International Publishing, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9.

Russell, Joshua. “Animal Narrativity: Engaging with Story in a More-Than-Human World.” Animal Subjects 2.0, edited by Jodey Castricano and Lauren Corman, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016, pp. 145–73.

Taylor, Nik. “Anthropomorphism and the Animal Subject.” Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments, edited by Rob Boddice, Brill, 2011, pp. 265–79.

Flow. Directed by Gints Zilbalodis, written and produced by Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža. Baltic Content Media: Latvia, 2024.


Samantha Baugus is a cat owner and critical animal studies scholar, focusing on human–animal interactivity and communication in written and digital media. She is currently a contingent faculty member at multiple universities in Missouri and online, and her forthcoming edited collection, Creature Redux: Consider the Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Chimera in Fiction and Popular Culture, will be published with the University of Mississippi Press. Previous publications are included in The Journal for Critical Animal Studies and Comparative American Studies.