A cat walks though the forest, avoiding a pack of dogs but almost gets trampled by a stampede of deer. The cat lives in an abandoned house where a cat obsessed artist has left sculptures from small to enormous all over the land. The cat sees the running deer were escaping a coming flood which covers everything up to several stories.
As the flood rises the cat finds refuge on a boat which already has one occupant, a capybara. Before long several more animals, a dog, a secretary bird, and a ring-tailed lemur have joined the crew as they explore a world empty of people and flooded by water. They learn to co-operate to live in a changed world.
The plot is simple but the story told is more profound, though, like his last film "Away" hard to pin down specific meanings. The cat's point of view is our point of view so we never know where the water came from or why or what happened to the people or how the resolution happens. This could be frustrating but it's really not. It's intriguing and beautifully animated using Blender, a free software and a smallish team that shows it doesn't take 150 million$ to make something meaningful and striking visual.
Its rare you look forward to a film and it meets and exceeds expectations. This certainly did for me. As with "Away" Zilbalodis has created a world to explore, again very Myst-like in its beauty and mystery. It's not a typical "its the friends we made along the way" trope of a movie, though it is that. There is death but handled in a way that won't be traumatic to children and through the eyes of the main character, a cat, so its not from a human perspective. While I would love to know more about the backstory of this world it's better not to know. It might not even be earth to be honest or at least it might be an alternate one. One animal is familiar but not like any version of such a creature we see in our present world.
If you can see it, please do and buy the Blu-ray when/if it comes out. We need a lot more films like this to be made.
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