Helga without the H

Almost every year I attempt (with varying degrees of success) to watch as many Oscar nominees as possible before the ceremony. I post half-assed reviews here on my blog, and then at the end I write up some sort of silly analysis, predictions, reactions, etc. The quantity and quality depends entirely on how much time and energy I have each year, and I’m not gonna lie, this year’s already starting pretty dang rough! But let’s see how it goes. Today we turn to:

Flow

[2 nominations for best animated feature and international feature]

Full disclosure: I am EXTREMELY BIASED on this one, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who knows me personally. But if you do not, I just so happen to be Latvian-American. Which means…

URRĀĀĀĀĀĀĀĀĀĀĀĀĀ LATVIJAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Flow has earned Latvia’s first-ever Oscar nominations, which is FREAKING INCREDIBLE!!!! WAHOO!!! LAT-VI-JA! LAT-VI-JA! LAT-VI-JA!

Let’s take a brief walk through Latvian film history, for those who are unfamiliar. Not that I’m an expert, but… you know. When I was a child, the only Latvian movie I knew was called Spridītis.Sprīdītis was apparently filmed in the 80’s, but felt like it was from the 1960’s due to the fact that it was made behind the iron curtain. It was very, very Latvian (read, kinda weird.) Latvia is a country full of absolutely incredible arts and artists. We have an deep-rooted choral tradition, some of the world’s best examples of Art Nouveau architecture, etc. But also… sometimes we just do weird shit. Just check out our Eurovision entries. When I lived in the UK I hushed a room full of friends when Latvia came on, bragging about how incredible our music is; then Cosmo came out doing random acapella echo noises and walking weird little wooden puppets across the stage. We also had a song where people dressed as pirates, one about “eating salad”(wink wink) and one about baking a cake (I know the singer on that one- she’s great!) That weirdness stretches to other elements of life. Latvia came up with this totally bokers ad campaign a few years ago called “A Nation of Introverts.” Like… We thought a good way to draw people to our nation… was to highlight that we’re all standoffish and cold. People were super proud of this thing. So weird.

On top of being kinda weird, Latvian arts don’t cater to American-born short attention spans. My Latvian children’s books were always text-heavy with kinda creepy small illustrations, which was a sharp contrast from the big beautiful picture books from American school, where each masterpiece of a page only contained a couple sentences of text. And Latvian speeches were always loooooong- everything from campfire skits for children, to formal addresses from diplomats and cabinet ministers, have always had me squirming in my seat.

So back to Sprīdītis, a tale based on a beloved children’s story about a kid who runs away from his physically abusive home to search for gold but… well, actually check out this video, which can explain it a lot better than I can. Sprīdītis has always been the epitome of the “Latvian vibe” to me where art is concerned.

After Latvia regained freedom in the early 90s, it took the country a while to start fitting in with (I hesitate to say “catching up to”) the western world. Whenever a Latvian movie was big enough for Latvians-Americans to have heard of it, we’d check it out. One of the first examples (I’m killing myself trying to remember the title) was about Latvian Freedom fighters protecting Riga from a bunch of various armies. This battle is smack dab in the middle of what I consider to easily be the most confusing moment in all of Latvian history. So… making a movie of it sounds like a swell idea! This movie did vaguely resemble a real movie, but it still had that weird Latvian sheen. Something was just… off. Everything was just a little cheesy. The acting was a bit too “early talkies.” The special effects were a nice attempt. But would I have recommended it to any non-Latvian friends? Absolutely not. We were SO PROUD of this movie, because, hey, we made A movie! But Oscar wasn’t exactly knocking on our door.

Next up was a sports movie (again struggling on the title… “Dream Team”maybe?) I personally loved this movie. It was a classic tale, based on a true story, about an underdog Latvian basketball team trying to go compete against the big boys at the European championship. (This one hit me personally because my grandfather completed on Latvia’s student basketball team around the same time and also medaled at the European student championships. He’s not in this movie, though.) The movie hit on every underdog sports movie cliche that’s out there. It very much resembled a real movie! Huzzah! Huge step forward! FInally, something that’s not weird! But was it a GOOD movie? No. It was very average.

The first good Latvian movie I remember was called something like “Mother I Love You.” It was about a kid who loses his saxaphone and has to find it. It was the first Latvian movie where I thought, “This is a legitimately good movie. And not just a good-for-being-Latvian film- it’s legitimately good.” I saw another one in a theatre about a girl in poverty who has to pretend her parents are still around so she can collect their welfare checks. Latvia started churning out quiet dramas that had finally caught up to the world of serious European indie flicks. But even the good movies were all still just… kinda weird, and/or slow and long. Last fall to celebrate Latvian film and arts, a Latvian website was streaming Latvian movies for free. I couldn’t watch this stuff. One was literally just a couple hours of filming people standing outside their windows (literally, that was it- nothing happened.) I clicked an animated kids movie thinking it would at least be quick and fun, but instead it was weird stop-motion about an acorn. Latvia, what are you guys doing?

But then, a miracle happened. That miracle is named Flow. And now, finally, the actual review! I’d seen that Flow was gaining some traction, and that Latvia had submitted it for all sorts of awards, blah blah blah. In my mind I was still assuming, “Ok, it will probably be very Latvian, kinda weird. But good for us.” When I realized it was being played in a real AMC megaplex theatre by my house, with a full run, as opposed to being a limited engagement in a random indie theatre like every other Latvian film, I figured I might as well catch it.

OH. MY. GOD. This movie wasn’t just “good for being Latvian.” This movie was GOOD. But beyond being good, this movie was INCREDIBLE. This movie deserves all the awards. This movie is the very first Latvian movie I’ve ever seen where I don’t just love it because of my Latvian bias, I love it because it’s absolutely spectacular. Coming from me, someone who tends to shit on movies (especially animated kids’ movies), this is saying something.

What makes it so good? For me, it’s as simple as this: it made me feel real feelings. I was having actual anxiety during the flood scene, in a way that no natural disaster adventure movie has ever made me feel. There is a scene early on where the cat start to drown. It wasn’t a big crazy action scene with dramatic music; it was a quiet struggle as the cat sank farther and farther into the darkness. And holy shit, even though I KNOW the cat survives because we’ve got most of the movie left to go, and even though it’s just a cartoon for pete’s sake, I was losing my mind with fear. I found myself muttering, “Wow” over and over and over again.

Another thing I really appreciated in the film was the realism of the animals. There is zero dialogue in this movie. And yet each animal came alive with personality in a way that is familiar to any pet owner. Our household pets talk to us all the time, without saying a word. That’s what these animals did. They weren’t anthropomorphized at all- they acted like real animals (at least the cat and dogs did- I don’t have much experience with lemurs or chupacabras.) But somehow they managed to convey so much more to us than if they’d followed the usual path we see for animals in animated films.

I was weirded out by the animation style before I went in. In previews, it looked… shitty. It looked unrendered. I actually took some 3D modeling classes in college (never got to the 3D animation class before switching gears), and we learned how to first build our rough models, and then afterwards render them to add texture. 3D animation has obvious come a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG way in the past 2 decades, which is part of why I was confused by these previews. Even I know as a beginner 2 decades ago that you’ve gotta render your shit, or else it looks like lazy garbage. But my fears were quickly assuaged. It’s clear from watching the film that the animators know what they’re doing- the natural world around our animals is absolutely perfect. The water in particular (and there’s a lot of it, being it’s a movie about a global flood) looks amazing. The whole thing is jaw-dropping. The choice to leave out rendered realism does not detract as I’d feared it would.

Finally, I was worried this movie might be boring. Here’s the basic plot- the world floods, and our cat winds up surviving by jumping onto a boat. The cat meets other animals who also wind up on the boat, and they sail around the world meeting more animals along the way. It sounds super boring, but it’s not. It’s an absolute rollercoaster. I liken it to the film 1917, which was shot to look like just 1 big 2 hour long shot as we follow a single character’s WW1 journey through the ringer of non-stop adventure. There’s always something happening in this film.

Flow won the golden globe for animated feature, beating out big studio heavy-hitters like Inside Out 2 and Moana 2, as well as beloved artsy features like The Wild Robot and this year’s Wallace and Gromit (I love W&G). I haven’t seen Wild Robot yet, but from internet buzz it sounds like folks who like Flow also like Wild Robot, and those two are seen as favorites. So I’m definitely pulling and hoping for it to snag the big win here as well for best animated feature. Unfortunately it stands no chance in it’s other category- best International Feature, where it is up against Emilia Perez. Everyone knows that if a foreign film is also nominated for Best Picture, it’s going to win best international feature. Otherwise why would it even be nominated for best picture? Which is a big shame, because Emilia Perez sucked balls (see my prior review), and flow is WAAAAY better. Oh well. It’s an honor just being nominated.