If you loved the Oscar-winning animated masterpiece Flow, then a H๏τly anticipated upcoming video game adaptation about a stray cat is the movie for you. Flow, the latest winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, broke all the rules of animated films. It wasn’t produced by a big studio; it was a tiny indie production animated on the free open-source software Blender. It doesn’t have any dialogue; the entire story is told through its animal characters — and the animals actually act like real animals; they’re not anthropomorphized cartoon characters.
Flow is gorgeously animated, emotionally engaging, and deeply thought-provoking. It offers an ominous glimpse at the possible effects of climate change, with a world where rising sea levels have seemingly wiped out humanity, but it’s not a message movie. It’s just a simple story about a cat that uses the cat’s perspective of a dystopian future to comment on the flaws of humanity. The upcoming movie adaptation of the video game Stray will be perfect for Flow fans, because it does the exact same thing.
Flow’s Success Proves The Movie Adaptation Of Stray Could Be Great
Stray Is Another Story About A Cat Surviving In A Dystopian World
Flow’s universal acclaim and box office success prove that audiences will go for a movie about a regular non-speaking cat surviving in a dystopian world, so the movie adaptation of Stray could really work. The award-winning game puts players in the perspective of a cat. Like the cat in Flow, it’s just a normal cat; it moves, behaves, and meows completely realistically. When the cat gets stranded in a walled city full of robots and mutant bacteria, the player has to find a way back out into the natural world.
Audiences will gladly follow a cat on a futuristic adventure that inspires hope despite its bleak backdrop, and that kind of storytelling can result in pure cinema.
In 2023, Annapurna Animation — the sister company of the game’s developer, Annapurna Interactive — announced that it was working on a film adaptation of Stray. There’s been no word on an official release date and no director has been hired to helm the project, but it’s in early development. And after Flow, I have hope that an animated movie version of Stray could work wonders. Audiences will gladly follow a cat on a futuristic adventure that inspires hope despite its bleak backdrop, and that kind of storytelling can result in pure cinema.
Stray Will Be A Very Different Movie Than Flow (But Can Still Be Just As Good)
Stray Is More Action-Packed – And It Has Robots
Although it has a similar story, Stray will be a very different movie than Flow. The cat’s relationship with its drone companion, B-12, makes it a buddy comedy. It’s more action-packed than Flow, with several nail-biting sequences where the cat is relentlessly pursued by hungry bacteria, and its robot characters will give the film spoken dialogue. But it can still be just as great as Flow, because it can reflect a cat’s simplistic view of a fraught world the same way Flow does.
