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 the same thematic ground, the same simple narrative as Flow itself. Away can be thought of as something like a proto-Flow depicting a boy, parachuting onto an island, and then travelling across an often submerged landscape with an injured chick in tow, with a seemingly unstoppable monstrous force chasing him. These elements return, refined to perfection, in Flow, in particular the depiction of the natural world, and the film's momentum driven by a force, this time the rising waters that threaten to swallow what is left of civilisation, something its animal cast can only continue outrunning to survive

All aboard: the 'cast' of Flow

More remarkably, Away was animated, written by, and its music, later nominated for an Annie Award, composed by Zilbalodis himself, with Flow itself animated by a team of 40-50 animators. This teamwork, and making a film together with others singles out Flow from its predecessor. What the two films have, most obviously, is their lack of dialogue; Flow has not a single speaking voice across its 80+ minutes, and, like its predecessor, its story is told through visuals, the film's score, with Zilbalodis joined on scoring duties by composer Rihards Zaļupe, and immaculate sound design that made me wish I'd seen this in the cinema on its brief UK release, by Gurwal Coïc-Gallas, whose own cat features heavily as the voice of Flow's protagonist. 

Similarly bold film-making can be seen in 2016's The Red Turtle and 2023's Robot Dreams, and of course the Oscar-nominated The Triplets of Belleville (2003). It is a hard thing to get right, to build character with, yet, the film breathes; it is almost impossible to imagine - in sharp contrast to The Wild Robot, released in the same year - what voice actors could have added to this film. Here we join that cat and a growing group of animals, including all of the characters that now dot Riga, above, and a secretarybird, as they travel across a submerging landscape to find shelter. To recount the film's narrative, the broad brushstrokes of Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža's script, is to miss the point of the journey, as the cat and its companions grow from a mismatched group of animals thrown together in a boat, to a collective working together for survival. 

Flow is both a beautifully animated film, and a masterfully told parable of co-operation to survive

Their designs, once again the work of Zilbalodis, and that of the world around them is naturalistic, but beautifully simple: each is identifiable, even in the film's several setpieces, and their stylisation, especially on the cat itself, allows the emotional moments to be such, when music and sound is not enough. Small wonder they became beloved in their native Latvia and beyond. What is equally remarkable, what makes me excited about the success of Flow - aside from being an unabashed cat-lover - is that all of it, and Away, and Zilbalodis' next feature, 2028's Limbo is not animated on some propitiatory in-house software, costing millions of dollars to engineer, but on Blender, a free open-source piece of software that anyone can learn how to use. Like the cheap camcorders of the 90s and the MiniDVs of the 90s and 2000s, there is something wonderfully exciting about this democratisation of animation, and I cannot wait to see what else it brings. 

The narrative of the film is deceptively simple, and emotionally driven. It is easy to ascribe a role to each of the five travellers: the cat is solipsistic, and only slowly becomes part of the group, the capybara is gentle and calm, the lemur selfish, the dog loyal and the muscle of the group, and the injured secretarybird must find purpose without flight as it joins the group, but one is ultimately to consider them as a group, figures in a storybook tale, or more correctly, as a parable. Even as the world fills with water, the rising waves swallowing the animals' homes, so they band together and so the cat overcomes its fear of water. 

Concept art for Flow's feline protagonist, by director/writer/composer, Gints Zilbalodis

It is easy to ascribe meanings to this in lieu of dialogue, be it biblical flood through which a white bird guides our heroes, or prescient fear of what climate change is doing to the world we hold dear, and our collective need to band together to save what we can, and each other, from the waves, or simple fable on the importance of working together to make a film. In a way, the cat that now looks out over Riga is Gints Zilbalodis himself, working together with his team to make something that lifts an entire medium, that at once tackles our greatest fears, and suggests a new way forward for creating animation as an artform. Flow is a film that at once acts as grand parable of collaboration against the odds, and inspiration for anyone who has ever wanted to make an animated movie. 

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Flow is available on BluRay from Criterion and on streaming on the BFI Player

Next week, we complete this look at animation with Hayao Miyazaki's most recent feature to date, the deeply autobiographical, fantastical, The Boy and the Heron