ANIMATION; 1hr 24min
Class menagerie
Gazing at his watery reflection in the opening shot of this Academy Award and Golden Globe–winning Latvian, French and Belgian co-production, the saucer-eyed hero cat is as watchful as the survival instinct itself. A typically feline model of self-sufficiency, the cat is content to cruise solo through the iridescent forest near his home. But the caprices of nature can be savage, and while a dog pack in hot pursuit is just another day on the prowl, an obliterative flood is something else again. The cat barely makes it back to the house that his humans have abandoned, and when he does return, it’s with an unwelcome yellow Labrador in tow (more on that guy later).
With water levels rising, silky and deadly, the cat’s only way out is a drifting sailboat. Its inhabitant is a sleepy capybara, who, unlike his new shipmate, has no problem keeping his cool: freaked by a swooping secretary bird (seriously, yes), the cat falls off the boat, fetching up on the back of a whale from which he is rescued by said bird and dropped back on board, thereby adding a fresh definition to the concept of Bad Day. The capybara, meanwhile, pals up with a stranded ring-tailed lemur and his hand mirror.
On the face of it, these paradoxical, sleekly computer-animated creatures, immaculately observed by Away director Gints Zilbalodis and his co-writer, Matīss Kaža, could not have less in common. Yet in Zilbalodis’s stricken mini-verse, they — and that frisky yellow Lab — are each other’s only enduring chance. Without a single syllable spoken, the message to co-exist or die not trying grows resonantly clear, as a fight for life unfolds into a dazzling meditation on love.
