Director Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow is a cute animal romp about an adorable black kitty — that also happens to be a tense adventure set in a strange, post-apocalyptic world, and one of Polygon’s top 10 movies of 2024. Flow is Zilbalodis’ second feature film, and it’s the natural evolution of his first movie Away, which also follows a main character on a wordless journey, determined to get somewhere and away from something. Away is the perfect complement to Flow, and it’s a gorgeous and surreal adventure in its own right that you can watch for free right now.
Away was a solo project, with Zilbalodis doing all the animation, screenwriting, and music by himself. Like Flow, it has no dialogue, as the story is told only through the animation and music. Away follows a lone boy trekking across a mysterious landscape, at first on foot and then on a motorcycle. Initially, he has no set destination in mind – he’s simply determined to outpace a large shadowy figure that seems to suck all the life from the creatures it encounters. Eventually, the boy discovers a map and sets course for what appears to be some sort of human civilization in the distance.
The landscapes that the nameless protagonist encounters are dreamlike and nearly empty, save for a few curious animals. The boy befriends a tiny yellow bird with big black eyes, who struggles to fly, and that wee bird becomes his companion. There are other normal animals, like a fox who wants to hunt the bird, but there is also a group of black cats that commune by a well and a parade of elephants that slowly walk across a mirror-like lake. The natural world is beautiful, rooted in the familiar, but with just enough strangeness to paint a layer of eeriness over it.
Like with Flow, Zilbalodis thrives on keeping plot details ambiguous, never fully revealing what happened to the boy, what this shadowy figure is, or where the boy is ultimately going. That murkiness doesn’t detract from the story; if anything, it just makes it feel even more accurate to being a dream. We’re dropped into this surreal world, and the only thing we know for certain is that this boy must not let the shadow figure get him. Eventually, through the boy’s dreams and the setting details, we get more hints about what’s going on. But Zilbalodis never truly shows his full hand, adding to the movie’s ethereal vibes. And by withholding dialogue, he shines a magnifying glass on the setting details and character movements, focusing the attention on what’s unsaid while weaving in the themes with an understated subtlety.
Away isn’t intentionally a prequel, but there’s a similar energy threaded through Flow and Away, with a certain existential loneliness that permeates across the two films. After all, they’re both about two small figures trekking across sweeping landscapes — worlds that are both familiar but just different enough to be a very deliberate sort of off-putting — trying desperately to outrun the inevitable. Away shines in particular in this way, because it feels even more isolated. Even though he finds some companionship, the boy in Away is still the only human that we see, with only his shadowy dreams and the promise of something on a map to offer him any hope. It’s stark and stunning and paves the way for the unlikely friendship in Flow to hit even harder.
Away is available to watch for free with ads on Tubi.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/animation-cartoons/493018/flow-director-animated-away-movie
