The Flow movie ending: Here’s what it all means
The animated movie Flow made history recently when it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, beating out the smash Pixar hit Inside Out 2 and Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot. The movie was first released in Latvia under the name Straume and it’s since become the most-viewed film in Latvian history, as well as the first one to win an Academy Award.
It’s a worldwide phenomenon, something that’s especially surprising considering there’s no dialogue at all. There’s also the question of that ambiguous ending. Not to worry, we’re here to sort that all out and explain what director Gints Zilbalodis was trying to tell us all.
Before we get into all that, let’s do a little background.
What is ‘Flow’ about?
Flow is set on either Earth, or an Earth-like planet. There are no humans to be seen and there’s been some sort of catastrophic flood event that’s turned most of the world into a swimming pool. Our main character is a black cat who has the unfortunate task of constantly escaping rising floodwaters despite being afraid of water.
Fortunately, the cat meets up with a sailboat and meets a number of fun animal friends: a capybara, a bird, a dog and a lemur. They don’t speak with each other so most of their interactions and communications are more physical than anything else. The boat eventually arrives in a city where something mystical happens with gravity. They also run into a dreamlike whale who seemingly soars through the air when it leaps from the water.
The Ending of ‘Flow’ Explained
At the end of the film, the cat watches the bird fly into some sort of heavenly light while the cat tries to find its way back to the boat. Just when it seems like the cat will be overtaken by the water before he can reach the vessel, the waters rapidly recede and a foresty area appears underneath. All of the animals, minus the bird, reunite and find a beached whale who was caught unaware by the rapidly shrinking water.
The animals huddle together and study their reflections in a puddle of water, right before the screen cuts to black.
Instead of suppositioning about the ending, let’s get the straight talk from director Zilbalodis himself. In an interview with Animation Scoop, the director said he didn’t want his movie to have a generic “simple happy ending,” but instead show how the cat overcame his fear of water for the most part, despite still having those fears embedded “deep down.”
“I didn’t want the simple happy ending where everything’s solved and the cat learns to overcome everything. I don’t feel like life is like that,” he said. He explained that while we can change “certain things” about ourselves and get more brave because of it, there are some anxieties that we’re going to feel “no matter what.”
He wanted to show that “we can accept those things, and maybe there’s others who can support that.” In that sense, the ending of the movie is a reflective one, both for the characters of the film and the audience watching.
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