The movie FLOW is wonderful. Does anyone have theories about what the hell is going on?

The incredible movie Flow, out now, follows the journey of a cat who must bond with unlikely allies to escape a terrifyingly destructive flood.

All of the animals in the movie act almost completely as real animals would in the various situations they find themselves; there’s very little anthropomorphism, beyond the use of some simple tools. And even that doesn’t come close to some of the wild feats of intelligence I’ve seen untrained animals perform on YouTube.

Very quickly, the movie reveals itself to take place in a fantasy world, the lore and rules of which are never explained. We see massive sculptures and bizarre land formations unlike anything on earth, but conspicuous by their absence is humanity. All around the animal characters, the residual pieces of some kind of magical society Are left empty to sink beneath the ever rising tide.

Eventually, we see an actual wild sequence of supernatural magic, and what appears to be one of the animal characters very literally ascending into heaven? Shortly thereafter, the water begins to lower; the two incidences seem connected but the correlation isn’t clear.

The boat we see in the tree at the beginning let us know that the waters have risen before. But how and why any of this is happening appears totally opaque on first viewing.

Does anyone have any theories or ideas about how the world of flow came to be abandoned, what the rising tides mean, or what happened to the bird?