Reader Debra says “Farbsy is a comedian on Instagram who pretends to run a customer service line for cats.” That is, the animals call in to beef.
Click the picture or here to see the video on Instagram, and sound up:
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There’s a new cat movie called “Flow”, made in Latvia, which gets an unheard-of rating for both critics and audience on Rotten Tomatoes:
And the NYT review, archived here, is also excellent, especially if you’re an ailurophile:
“Flow,” an animated adventure film with a touch of magical realism, is a welcome entrant in the cat-movie canon, exuding a profound affection for our four-legged friends.
Its hero, a plucky black cat with round, expressive eyes, doesn’t speak a word of dialogue, and acts more or less like a domestic house cat, but under the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s doting gaze, he’s as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for. Purring, scratching and scrabbling up walls, this cat virtually leaps off the screen.
“Flow,” written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, concerns the cat’s survival during a flood of almost biblical proportions. The story, simple but compelling, unfolds as a kind of feline picaresque, as he clambers aboard a passing sailboat that drifts from one scenic exploit to another. He soon encounters other stranded animals, including a guileless Labrador retriever and a benevolent secretary bird, who tag along to form what eventually resembles a charming, ragtag menagerie. Their adventures together range from hair raising, as when a thunderstorm threatens to capsize their ship, to endearingly mundane, like when a rotund capybara helps a lemur gather a collection of knickknacks.
It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.
The trailer:
The film also has a Wikipedia entry (it also summarizes the plot, which you may want to avoid before you see it), and it details the movie’s encomiums:
Flow (Latvian: Straume) is a 2024 animated fantasy adventure film directed by Gints Zilbalodis and written by Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža. The film is notable for containing no dialogue.
Upon premiering at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the film received critical acclaim and won numerous film and animation awards, including the Best Animated Film awards at the European Film Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and the National Board of Review Awards. The film was selected as the Latvian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
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And here’s a five-minute video compilation of cats in the snow:
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h/t: Laura, Jez
Great Saturday post! Loved cats reaction to snow.
Love the snow cats—so familiar!
Also love the cats in the snow. Years ago I had two cats who loved for me to make tiny snowballs and throw them up in the air so the cats could jump up and catch them on the way down. They never figured out where the balls went when they missed and the balls went down into the snow.
I’m really looking forward to “Flow” and hope it eventually makes its way to southcentral PA!
Ah. Cats. I shall check this out. I notice that Jerry, and perhaps other readers of this blog, is much more of a cat person than a dog person, though I hope he appreciates a good dog too. I love them both, though in different ways. Maybe I’m like St. Francis with a big heart for the creatures. I also had friendship with a female Indian elephant. Briefly I had interesting friendship with a male seal lion. Call me a pinnipedophile. Those creatures are SMART, and very social, and, if the creature finds you simpatico, will give you dog-like devotion.
Anyways I shall discourse on dogs and cats and the different quality of the friendship we get from the quadrupeds. I think dogs are somewhat more primate-like in their affections. The philosopher Dan Dennet wrote of “multitransitive intentionality” which humans have more of than any other creature (who knows about cetaceans who also have a lot of it). And dogs much more than cats have it. It goes like this: In a social context we keep track of what others are aware of, including their awareness of what the others are aware of, and etc. For example, if you are at a party and Joe tells a joke, you may observe that Mary noticed than John didn’t notice that Susan didn’t get the joke. We effortlessly perceive that kind of thing.
The reason dogs are such amazing cooperative hunters and fighters is that they do that so well. Six dogs can kill a large powerful herbivore that would dangerous to one dog. The herbivore is surrounded by dogs. The herbivore can’t single out dog A to attack because the others will protect their comrade. Dogs B and C rush over to give A support. Dog D to make a diversionary attack from the rear, but is afraid to go it alone. So D signals E to join him. The herbivore whirls around to deal with D and E and then gets jumped by the other dogs. According to old Roman records, six large Roman mastiffs (huge dogs ancestral to the modern smaller Neapolitan mastiff) would often defeat a lion in their cruel circuses with no dog casualties. This is powerful cooperative fighting made possible by the dogs’ talent for perceiving multiply transitive intentionality.
I see this difference between dogs and cats. A dog can be happy that I’m happy that he’s happy that he loves me. I think that is a bit too psychologically complex for a cat, though in other respects the cat is an equally sincere lover of me. For multiply transitive intentionality, primates are at the pinnacle. Dogs and wolves and cetaceans and pinnipeds have a lot of it. Cats less. Many creatures lack the ability altogether, even if they are very smart in other ways.
Like all d*g lovers, you anthropomorphize.
Great Caturday content. Loved the cats in the snow. 🐈❄️🐈❄️
I wasn’t aware of Flow, it is now a must see for me. It looks spectacular. We lost the last of our 3 cats a couple of months ago, and the video of the cats in snow choked me up a bit. They are so endlessly entertaining, and so beautiful.
Ugh. 3 months ago is yesterday in grief time. So sorry. Our animal losses are the worst. I hope you won’t be like me…my last one left me 3 years ago and I’ve not gotten another. My last one was “mi favorito”. I know, we’re not supposed to have favorites, but he was mine.
Thanks!