Director – Gints Zilbalodis – 2024 – Belgium, France, Latvia – Cert. U – 84m
*****
A cat must survive rising water levels as they engulf both the countryside and cities – remarkable, dialogue-free, computer animated feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 21st, 2025
Like his earlier Away (2019), reissued here last week, Zilbalodis’ new CG animated movie features creatures who don’t speak as well as an incredible music score. The central character is a cat, and you’d be forgiven, after years of animated films about cats in which they talk, for expecting the same, but Zilbalodis isn’t interested in anthropomorphised talking animals. He’s clearly interested in animals, and in characters, but the cat here has been derived from watching and studying real life cats and their behaviour in the real world. There’s a long history of this in drawn animation, typified by the classic Disney films, where it was all about what you could achieve with a paper and pencil, studying from life, making drawings of characters move.
These days, the medium has moved on, and unless one is being purist and working with pencil and paper for the sake of making drawn animation the way it was made roughly a century ago (and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with doing that), you would use computers as Zilbalodis does.… Read the rest