Flow

Director: Gints Zilbalodis
Starring: 
Distributor: Madman films
Runtime: 85 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2025
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes:

Cat is a solitary animal, but as its home is devastated by a great flood, he finds refuge on a boat populated by various species, and will have to team up with them despite their differences.

The audience is invited to go with the flow – the flow of the narrative and flow of tidal water. Flow won the Academy Award for Best Animation Film, 2024. It also won many other awards around the world, a first for a film from Latvia.

The film took more than five years to make, using hand painting and CGI to create extraordinary backgrounds as well as a range of creatures. There is no dialogue, so the film is accessible to all audiences, young and old. Not only are the backgrounds beautifully treated, forests and foliage, abandoned ruins, scenes of both beauty and danger, so much of the action is in motion, on the water, the flow, audience admiration for such creativity and dynamism of action.

But there are also the animals. The invitation is to identify with a cat, roaming through fields where there are many statues of cats, but then a group of attacking dogs. The cat is able to escape onto a passing sailboat, finding a languid capybara as well as a lemur who holds onto a roped cache of precious objects. They are joined by a friendly Labrador, confronted by a large stork-like bird, then joined by the group of dogs. Many adventures as the group continues floating on the flow, a surprising encounter with a whale, the conflict between a group of birds, a group of unhelpful lemurs, the dangers of a steep cliff, the whale beached, shifts in the terrain and the boat caught in a branch. Audiences who come to know the animals and shared their journey will appreciate a tense scene, the cat taking initiative, helped by most of the others, to a rescue.

In the absence of dialogue, audiences are invited to surrender to the images, the beauty, the music, the action. Some audiences might find themselves providing words and phrases for their interpretation of what they see, a journey, a life’s journey, survival journey, an exodus, an odyssey, an ark… And, with the animals, naming some of the characteristics of friendliness, of ingenuity, of possessiveness, of confrontation, of help, of nobility…

Which means then that this is an animation film of beauty, of challenge, of imagination – and a welcome openness to different interpretations.