Ani-May-Tion: Flow (Dir Gints Zilbalodis, 1h25m, 2024)
In February 2025, in Riga, the capital of Latvia, a statue of a dark grey cat was unveilled. The statue would later move to Riga's Freedom Square and parks across the city would gain statues of a lemur, a capybara, and a labrador dog. These were not characters from Latvia's rich folklore, or from a beloved children's story, but from an animated feature film, released the previous summer, that had already broken all Latvian box office records, become the most viewed film in the country's history, and would, weeks after that feline statue took up residence, win the country its first ever Oscar, for Best Animated Feature. Yet, Flow is not just an remarkable achievement, but a environmentalist parable, and an idea of where animated movies as a medium are going. What is most remarkable about Flow is not its origins. Director Gints Zilbalodis has previously directed a single feature alongside a number of shorts, Away (2019), that covers much of...
