Flow (2024)

The greatest flow on earth

At the 97th Academy Awards on March 2, 2025, the unthinkable happened: Flow, an independent Latvian animated film with no stars, no studio backing, and no merchandise shelf at Target, took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. In a year that saw profitable, critically acclaimed heavyweights from DreamWorks and Pixar, Flow rode a wave of word-of-mouth and festival buzz, and that wave did not crest until hitting the biggest stage in Hollywood. People love this movie. And honestly, to be flippant for moment, it’s as easy as pressing play to see why.

What’s most immediately striking about Flow is what’s missing: dialogue. Not a word. It’s not that this is a silent film: The soundtrack is full and busy. The characters make noises, but they are non-verbal and free of human language: we are not given subtitle translations as to their meanings. This isn’t a case of “less is more” so much as “none is most.” The simplicity of the scenario and presentation is tremendous. We’re so used to animated films quipping and bantering and explaining themselves that watching one keep its yapper shut feels like a miracle. And I think that’s a key part of the appeal: Flow has a universality that transcends language. With its self-imposed limitation, it has made a film that anyone who can understand the visual storytelling of pantomime and the tone of wordless grunts can appreciate.

Flow began as a solo project by Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis more than five years before its release. He previously animated the microbudget feature Away, which I have not seen but whose reputation is mixed bordering on, uh, radioactive. Zilbalodis eventually roped in help for his sophomore effort. He received funding from various art grants. France’s Sacrebleu Productions and Belgium’s Take Five came on board for animation support — but unlike most studio-driven animation, Flow always gives you a sense of a single hand guiding the whole enterprise. Zilbalodis did much of the animation himself using the free software Blender. He also co-wrote, co-produced, co-composed, and edited the film. “Auteur-created feature-length narrative animation” is almost a contradiction-in-terms in the 21st century, and yet Zilbalodis not only pulled it off but created something special.

Flow opens with a dark-gray cat wandering through a forest, scrounging for food, avoiding a pack of dogs. A sense of anxiety fills the air. Within a few minutes, a massive flood sweeps the cat up. It survives, and soon finds itself aboard a sailboat accompanied by a ramshackle, pan-species crew. The flooded world the boat drifts through is a dreamlike blend of nature and dystopia: tree canopies poke out from floodwaters, empty cities crumble under tides, landscapes glimmer half-submerged, strange statues drift in the distance. The act of floating down a flooded river is, more-or-less, the film’s story. The danger comes and goes in little episodes of varying shapes: Some episodes are mechanical and procedural problem-solving to keep the boat floating downstream. Others are more visceral — can the animal escape the water and get back on the boat before it sails off? And other vignettes are more spiritual; about reckoning with a broken world and its broken inhabitants. This strung-together, episodic narrative structure maybe sounds primitive in concept, but you start watching and then suddenly you’re 35 minutes in and you’ve barely blinked.

The cat’s crewmates form a proxy family of animals with an array of personalities. There’s a chipper and loyal yellow Labrador Retriever, a peaceful capybara, a fidgety lemur, and, finally, a haughty, high-strung secretarybird who lords over the rest, both physically and perhaps on some deeper level. The group dynamics are wordlessly intuitive, from the lemur’s tchotchke-hoarding mischief to the dog’s unwavering friendliness, and the way each of the characters reacts to the others. The film is told from the cat’s perspective, so it is always the film’s emotional center, but Flow is generous to its ensemble, and you come to love all of them and resent the interlopers that cause the crew trouble. (Stupid dogs.)

It’s hard not to read Flow as an eco-fable. The film never editorializes directly, but the imagery does the talking: rising seas, abandoned cities, shattered remnants of human life reclaimed by the elements. Lots of imagery of destruction. The cause of the apocalypse is unspecified, and better for it: it could be a dam break or some distant storm or maybe the end times — but the result is unmistakable and climate change-coded. Humans are extinct or absent; nature has survived but been mutilated. The film’s most direct symbol is the giant whale-like creature that keeps resurfacing in unnatural places, sometimes to help, sometimes just to be mourned. It has a mythic weight to it, as if it carries with it both the memory of the world and the weight of its loss.

I do like the animation itself, but it’s undoubtedly where you notice that Zilbalodis made this on a shoestring compared to the big Hollywood boys. The look is “stylized” in the sense that we often use that word to describe animation that is not fully cutting-edge photorealistic. But I’m not sure you can really say that Flow has a “style,” per se. One reviewer called it “faux-oil painting.” I can buy that, but it mostly just looks a little smudgy. The character designs are mostly realistic, but not militantly so (particularly in the expressive, cartoony eyes). They have a slightly undercooked look about their texturing and some of the finer points of their design (especially noticeable in the faces of the dogs). Quite honestly, the characters look like they wandered in from a PS3 cutscene. The camera is always soaring, almost to the point of exhaustion. On the more positive side, the environments are quite lovely, and are probably where a lot of the external teams provided support: the vistas are sprawling and haunting, the water pleasing to spend so much time in. It’s a film that works around its technical limitations with heart and clever direction, pulling your eyes more often than not towards the more interesting parts of the frame. (I describe A Goofy Movie similarly, which is high praise.)

Still, there’s no denying the animation is the biggest hurdle to loving Flow. In a post-Spider-Verse world, where big studios are bending and stretching the visual language of animation in wild new ways, Flow can look quaint. If you were feeling ungenerous, you might even call it ugly. Some animation lovers I follow had trouble getting into the movie for these formal and aesthetic reasons (see: this review on Kinemalogue and this capsule by Tim Brayton). I get that these shortcomings might undercut a movie that depends deeply on your immersion, even if I didn’t experience the same. None of it sinks the movie, but it does require a shift in expectations from the viewer.

And it’s not just the visuals that show strain. The wordless storytelling, while overall graceful, puts a ceiling on what the characters can express. The characters’ personalities and inner lives do come through in their character animation to some extent, especially the cat, whose face is a marvel of tiny expressive choices, but some nuance and interiority is lost.

There’s also a slightly video gamey quality to the film that’s hard to shake. The characters board a boat, set off downriver, encounter and overcome environmental challenges, meet new party members, repeat. The cat survives falling off the boat about a dozen times, like it has a bunch of 1UPs to burn; three would have sufficed. The film never really runs out of steam, but after a while, the visceral sense of danger diminishes. The movie has momentum, but not always urgency.

And yet I didn’t care about a damn one of those complaints as I was watching and even as I’ve sat with it. Flow transcends its flaws. It’s a textbook case of vision over resources. Zilbalodis isn’t competing with Pixar on polish; he’s telling a story that only works because of his unique voice and the clarity of his vision. Too often, indie animation is almost necessarily synonymous with quirkiness, and yet the idiosyncrasies of Flow make it feel huger, its world more unexplained and unexplainable. The constraints become the language. The film’s huge heart and sense of adventure hide the seams.

The cumulative effect of Flow touched me. It pays off with a surreal moment of apotheosis between the cat and the secretarybird. Even if I described this moment in fastidious detail, it would not convey. The first time I watched the film was with my wife and my two daughters. All four of us were choking up at this scene. When the credits started rolling about fifteen minutes later, my five-year-old immediately announced she wanted to start it over and watch it again. I felt the same way. Flow is one of my favorite films of 2024, and one of my favorites of the decade so far. Sometimes the most profound statement you can make is to shut your damn mouth.

Is It Good?

Exceptionally Good (7/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.