My gray cat Samadhi “Sammy” Timewalker insistently joined my friends and me to watch the Oscar-winning animated movie Flow. Since Sammy, my mysterious Christmas Eve kitty who appeared out of a blizzard in 2016 in my semi-rural predator-filled neighborhood, looks exactly like Georgie—the time-traveling cat in Weather Menders who helps the human characters reverse climate change through time travel—I was not surprised at his rapt attention to this film.
Those who have read Weather Menders will recall that the story begins on an extremely hot September day in 2050 in a dystopian Britain flooded by the rising waters caused by global heating and decimated by three Great Plagues. When I wrote the first draft in 2015—only a decade ago—I thought I was wildly exaggerating both the degree and speed of climate breakdown and the scenario of depopulating pandemics. Now I’m not so sure.
The trailer for Flow had captivated me as I watched the winsome cat—a black cat who sometimes looks gray like Sammy/Georgie—lose his familiar peaceful and beautiful environment to a terrifying flood. I cried watching how beings of various species came together as new friends, and knew I had to see this movie.
Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis hasn’t said anything about the film being about climate change, but I’ve read interviews where he talks about the cat overcoming his fear of water and other fears. As a writer, I know that sometimes the story you are creating taps into the collective unconscious and carries messages from the noosphere back to human awareness in ways the creator didn’t consciously intend and may not even have been aware of.
Cats and Dogs Are Fascinated by the Film
Watching the movie with my friends and Sammy—who thankfully has never been caught in a flood or even seen a river—I couldn’t help but see the story as a metaphor for the water element out of balance. Disruption of the water cycle is of course a key component of the human-caused climate breakdown that we are already living through in the form of global weather wilding as the world breached the 1.5 degree C Paris Agreement target that had intended to avoid this very outcome—especially so soon and so quickly—for the first time in 2024.
Sammy and his cat companion Yeshe and I live outside Santa Fe in New Mexico. The American Southwest has suffered from extreme drought most of the time since around 2000. It’s now considered a megadrought punctuated by periods of heavy rain and snow, notably in 2006 when the summer monsoons started early and continued into the early fall, and then a surprise snowstorm dropped three feet of snow in the final days of the year.
I soon regretted buying a snow removal machine, as that was the sole large storm in the 30 years I’ve lived here. The only time this past non-heat season—formerly known as “winter”—that I needed my snow shovel and ice melt was the freak early November storm that began on the night of the tragic presidential election and dropped a foot of snow in three days.
At the beginning of the movie, all is well in the cat’s world. He roams freely in a beautiful land of wildflowers and trees. His biggest problem is a pack of dogs chasing him, which he easily outmaneuvers. He returns home to a human habitation of someone never shown but who obviously loves cats, as there are numerous sculptures of cats of all sizes and shapes in the expansive garden.
My Sammy became particularly interested at the point in the film when the waters begin to rise and the cat scampers up to the top of a hill-sized cat sculpture, crying in distress. By that time my friends and I were also crying in distress as Sammy sat on the coffee table and stared at the screen.
The cat is swept away and almost drowns in the flood, and has to swim for all he is worth. Eventually he ends up on a drifting damaged boat joined by fellow refugees, a menagerie from unlikely geographical origins. Capybaras are from South America, lemurs from the island of Madagascar off East Africa, and secretary birds are native to sub-Saharan Africa (I had to look that one up, even though I have seen them in South Africa). And the cat has to learn to accept one of the dogs who had previously teased him, a friendly, goofy—and somewhat annoying from the cat’s point of view—Labrador Retriever.
For me the metaphor of characters of different species from various parts of the Earth coming together and learning to cooperate speaks to the urgent need for humans of all cultures, nations, races, genders, and backgrounds to come together to address climate breakdown, the foundational existential threat to all life in the present time.
The characters are all very much true to their species and yet unique individuals of those species. They have their conflicts, sometimes over silly things like toys found in the flotsam and jetsam of flooded human habitation, but in the end they help each other out. When the secretary bird generously tries to give the hungry cat a fish, he is punished by other secretary birds to the point where he is seriously hurt. Later the courageous cat, who has overcome his feline fear of water, jumps repeatedly into the flood to bring back fish for all his companions.
The characters communicate telepathically—a talent that would also be useful for humans at this time—and follow instinct and intuition, each contributing their unique talents. They are not anthropomorphized, and their voices are the actual sounds that these creatures make, which may partly explain the fascination of the cats and dogs who watch the movie with their humans.
There are light-hearted parts to the film, as well as deeply mystical parts. The secretary bird and the cat float into a colorful vortex that I thought might be a wormhole into another dimension, visually echoing the cat’s previous swim through the flood. The secretary bird seems to disappear into a hole in the sky, while the cat floats gently back down to Earth.
“More than Human Beings”
I recently came across a term new to me, “more than human beings,” in an article in The Overview, a newsletter on the Atmos website. The Overview’s editor, Willow Diffebaugh, writes about attending the inaugural festival of the MOTH (“more than human life”) project, a New York University Law School initiative that “advances the rights of all beings in the web of life.” Eco-philosopher David Abram is credited with popularizing the term, which according to Diffebaugh “challenges the idea that non-human life is lesser. It invites us to see the beings we share this planet with as our elders.” This non-mainstream languaging, which Potawatomi writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass as the “grammar of animacy,” honors the diversity of life forms on Earth and views them as she/he/they rather than the cold, objectifying “it.” They are a “who,” not a “what.”
This concept resonates deeply with me as I watch this moving film about interspecies cooperation in the face of disaster alongside a very concerned gray cat.
For me, the film is a tribute to and a call to this very cooperation, and a reminder that we are all in “this”—this existential crisis caused by human-induced climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and environmental devastation—together. Though no humans are ever shown in the movie, and the “more than humans” must figure out their survival and thriving in a changed world for themselves, the film feels to me like a parable created by a heart-centered human who clearly understands the worlds and thoughts of other creatures.
My friends and I hope to see the film again on the big screen, but the experience of watching it with your feline and canine companions is worth streaming it at home. Then hold them close, give them treats, and do everything possible to create a world where they—as well as your human children and grandchildren and those young ones who are like family to you—can, like the friends in Flow, not only survive, but by learning to cooperate and “go with the flow,” perhaps even, somehow, thrive.
And be sure to watch all the way through the credits for a subtle glimpse of hope and rebalancing, and a reassurance that against the odds, maybe we are going to be all right after all.
Debra Denker is the author of Weather Menders, a cli-fi time travel novel for the hopeful.
Weather Menders 