Producers: Matīss Kaža, Gints Zilbalodis, Ron Dyens and Gregory Zalcman   Director: Gints Zilbalodis Screenplay: Gints Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža    Distributor: Sideshow/Janus Films

Grade: B+

Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ entrancing animated film begins with a shot of a slinky gray feline with enormous eyes staring at its reflection in a clear stream.  It ends with the cat doing so again, but this time it’s not alone: a dog, a capybara and a lemur stand beside it, scanning their reflections as well. 

How they came to be together represents the trajectory of “Flow.” Stunning animation marks this wordless, though hardly soundless, tale of a journey taken by a motley assortment of animals through a world that is apparently undergoing a second deluge of biblical proportions.  Not to worry, though: the humans are already nowhere to be seen, though the structures they left behind—rustic houses, flats that rise up like mountains, and statues of enormous size—remain.

Many of those statues are, for some reason, of cats, which perhaps perplexes the one we meet in the first scene admiring itself, as well as us viewers until the feline comes upon a woodcarver’s cabin with a well-used studio, littered with designs for such cat-centered structures left behind by the owner, where it promptly goes to sleep. 

The tranquility is shattered the following morning first by a pack of dogs chasing a rabbit, and then by the thunderous racket of a herd of deer bounding through the woods, their panic occasioned by a flood that sends a wall of water through the forest.  The cat scrambles atop the highest sculpture, notices the dogs in a boat being carried along by the waves, and then manages to hop onto a passing sailboat, where he meets the capybara, a gentle lummox.

That’s just the first of the critters to join what becomes a kind of crew.  A solitary lemur, collecting shiny bric-a-brac in a basket, is virtually forced to come aboard, and a golden Labrador retriever, separated from the pack, scuttles on deck as well.  Finally, there’s a haughty but empathetic white secretarybird which, after suffering an injury to its wing in protecting the cat from the more aggressive leader of its flock, hops aboard too.  Assuming a sort of captaincy, it takes charge of the rudder and steers the craft through the channels of a deserted city of houses that appear to have been carved out of beige stone, and past a huge amphitheater swarming with lemurs.

And yet it’s the cat who remains primus inter pares, holding our attention as it falls repeatedly into the water, in the process learning to swim without fear and scooping up the fish that it encounters in the luminous blue current.  Those underwater sequences are especially ravishing, but so are those above the waves, where a whale proves a helpful friend at one of the feline’s moments of greatest peril.  It will reappear toward the close in a sadder state as the waters recede, but a post-credits scene restores it to vibrancy.

Throughout, the backgrounds confected by Zilbalodis and animation director Léo Silly-Pélissier are gorgeous, and the animal characters are lovingly rendered without striving for the photo-realistic look of some recent Hollywood efforts; indeed, the slight imperfections in their movements seem intended to remind us that they are, after all, drawn representations.  There’s also a duality in their personalities.  These critters bond in the face of danger and cooperate in a way members of their different species would hardly do in real life, joining together, for instance, in a rescue effort at the close. But they’re not anthropomorphized; each retains its natural disposition.  And they don’t talk at all; one of the marvels of the film resides in the pains to which the filmmakers have gone to capture the squawks, barks, meows, hisses and chatter of actual animals.

As the closing credits make abundantly clear, “Flow” is a collaborative effort, the work of many hands; but like another recent animated film—Australian Adam Elliot’s “Memoir of a Snail”—it represents a singularly personal vision.  Zilbalodis is not only its director, co-producer and co-writer, but the art director, cinematographer and editor.  He also co-composed the lovely score with Rihards Zakupe, although the remarkable sound design, no less important, is by Gurwal Coïc-Gallas.

This is a remarkable film that avoids the cookie-cutter feel and overemphatic messaging of so much of today’s animated fare, and its visual beauty will enthrall viewers of all ages.  Of course, cat-lovers will be particularly appreciative.

Producers: Liz Kearney and Adam Elliot  Director: Adam Elliot   Screenplay: Adam Elliot   Cast: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Tony Armstrong, Paul Capsis, Bernie Clifford, Davey Thompson, Charlotte Belsey, Mason Litsos and Nick Cave   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: B+

Embracing Adam Elliot’s second Claymation or, to use his preferred term, Clayography feature requires a rather skewered sense of humor, but those possessing one will find it both funny and poignant, sad and, in the end, life-affirming.  In wonderfully tactile, imaginative hand-crafted animation supervised by John Lewis, “Memoir of a Snail” tells a wildly off-kilter tale of twin Australian siblings whose lives are wracked by multiple tragedies but wind up happy in the end.  You could call it Dickensian, but with a flavor all its own.

Their story is told in autobiographical terms by Grace Pudel (voiced as a child by Charlotte Belsey and a grown-up by Sarah Snook) as she sits morosely remembering her recently-deceased best friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver, deliciously over-the-top), a high-spirited eccentric.  Grace’s English mother died giving birth to her and her brother Gilbert (Mason Litsos as a boy, Kodi Smit-McPhee as a young man) in 1972.  Their father Percy (Dominique Pinon), a Frenchman who’d met his wife-to-be while busking as a juggler in Paris (a side job supplementing his work as a stop-motion animator) and followed her to Melbourne, gave Grace her mother’s collection of snail-themed knickknacks, which became symbolic of her mollusk-style attitude of shelling herself off from society—a trait accentuated by the bullying she suffered over her cleft lip, which led nasty kids to call her rabbit-face, and by a cap, topped by some pipe cleaners adorned with ping-pong balls for eyes, she wore.  Gilbert always rose to her defense, but the pint-sized kid was mostly obsessed with matches, dreaming of becoming a fire-eating busker someday.  Grace, meanwhile, performed acts of kindness on her own, like tending to a drunkard named James (Eric Bana), an erstwhile judge removed from the bench for conduct unbecoming.

The twins became orphans when Percy, who was confined to a wheelchair after being struck down by a drunken driver while performing (and had become an alcoholic himself), died shortly after taking them on a roller-coaster ride in a local amusement park.  They were separated, with Grace adopted by a pair of self-improvement-minded swingers, Ian and Narelle (both voiced by Paul Capsis) in Canberra, the city in Australia’s extreme east advertised as the world’s safest, and Gilbert sent to live with a family of religious zealots headed by Ruth (Magda Szubanski) and Owen (Bernie Clifford) in far-west Perth.

We’re informed of the experiences of both, Grace’s through her own recollections and Gilbert’s through the letters he sent her.  Grace attempted to make social contacts but mostly remained isolated, her marriage to a handyman named Ken (Tony Armstrong) having turned out badly, until she met the elderly Pinky, once an exotic dancer but now a wickedly wild old lady who became her confidante and, in a way, mentor.  Much time is devoted to Grace’s recitation of Pinky’s real or imagined adventures, including two hilariously brief marriages (one to a character voiced for a few seconds by Nick Cave) and encounters with the likes of John Denver and Fidel Castro.  With Pinky Grace develops a rare real friendship.  She also experiences karma when James returns at a pivotal moment in her endless efforts to secure every bit of snail collectables she can.  (She also maintains a family of real snails in a bottle, and is finally freeing them while weeping over Pinky’s demise.  We’re periodically directed to the slow progress of her favorite, Sylvia, as she continues her halting movement forward—serving not only as a symbol of all life’s inevitable motion, but as the means by which Grace realizes the location of a lost treasure.)

Though Grace’s life is a struggle, Gilbert’s is worse.  His adoptive family own an apple orchard and compel him to work in the business, paying him little and forcing to give over the pittance he makes to their oddball church.  Ruth punishes the rebellious boy at every opportunity, and when she finds that he and one of his foster brothers, Ben (Davey Thompson), are developing what she considers an unhealthy relationship, she organizes a hideously torturous exorcism that leads Gilbert to exercise his pyromaniac proclivities against the clan.  The result, unhappily, is the boy’s death, reported by Ruth to Grace on the very eve of her wedding to Ken.  Happily, the demise turns out to be of the Mark Twain variety, and just as Grace is unveiling her first effort at a stop-motion film. a dream inspired by her father, she gets the surprise of a lifetime.

As all this will indicate, “Memoir of a Snail” is not a film directed toward children, unless they be tykes with the adult tastes of young Grace and Gilbert, who are shown reading such tomes as “Lord of the Flies” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”  It’s also remarkably mature in terms of its eroticism; Pinky’s amorous inclinations and the ultimate residence of Grace’s adoptive parents at a nudist colony suggest as much, and when it comes to Ken’s interest in Grace, and Ben’s in Gilbert, it moves into territory parents might feel wary about their offspring watching.

But for grown-up viewers who appreciate something off the beaten track, this abundantly clever example of animation that magically melds tragedy and comedy will prove a consistently inventive and engaging treat, delivered with scruffy visual panache by Elliot (the production designer as well as writer-director), his stop-motion crew and editor Bill Murphy.  Nor should one overlook the superlative voice work down the line and the lovely score by Elena Kats-Chernin, which manages to reflect the essence of each changing mood with its piano and violin solos and alternating bubbly and morose tones.

Elliot has fashioned a “Memoir” that’s genuinely worth remembering.