Climate Collapse and Animal Resilience: Flow through the Post-anthropocentric Lens

Abstract: This paper explores how the film Flow (2024), the Oscar winning Latvian animated film, depicts a post-anthropocentric world of the aftermath of climate change. The film follows a black cat and other animals navigating a flooded world, that is devoid of any humans, on a boat. Depicting the animals as themselves, without too much anthropomorphizing and employing the help of human language to get their communication across to the viewers, the film decentres the humanized representations of animals in animated films. Also Flow emphasizes the interspecies interdependence and cooperation. The film portrays environmental apocalypse and animal resilience, aligning it with posthumanist concerns like climate change and nonhuman subjectivity. By presenting collective vulnerability and survival in the face of an ecological collapse, Flow wades through the waters of posthumanist concepts of community and co-existence. The paper attempts to examine how the film portrays this interconnection amidst climate collapse, and how it emphasizes nonhuman subjectivity.

Keywords: Post-anthropocentrism, climate change, nonhuman subjectivity, posthumanism, Flow