You don’t have to love cats to love “Flow,” a 2024 animated adventure fantasy film directed by Gints Zibalodis based on a script by Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža. From the posters, you’ll know this film involves a cat, a dog, a ring-tailed lemur and a capybara traveling. It might sound like an incredible journey story, but this is a winsome, fanciful tale about cross-species cooperation in the absence of people.

 

Yet the film eases us into our journey, starting with a cat who crosses paths with a rabbit. The rabbit is running from a pack of five dogs and suddenly, the cat is being chased. So early in the film, of course, our main character cat will escape. The black cat with incredibly bright yellow eyes eventually finds refuge in a place that seems to have been devoted to cats. There are statues of various sizes in various postures of cats in a grassy area off of a body of water. The cat goes past these and then up a small house and enters the second floor from a broken window. The cat snuggles on the bed. Someone once lived there and perhaps the cat remembers better times there.

Slowly, the cat realizes this place is no longer safe. It isn’t the dogs. It is the water. The water is rising and not always slowly. Deer stampeding and then birds rushing–both in the same direction, precede a flash flood. The cat and the pack of dogs are swept away but survive. The cat returns to the high ground of the house and while the dogs leave in a boat, the cat remains until the only dry area is at the top of a giant cat sculpture.

The cat is saved by a sailboat that has only a capybara on board. This is where the film takes a gentle turn, easing us into a fantasy. The capybara can guide the boat using the rudder. As you can tell by the poster, eventually, the cat and capybara will be joined by a ring-tailed lemur and a Golden Retriever. The lemur will be the most human-like, gathering treasures that include a mirror.

This foursome will meet other animals and the lemur and dog will encounter group their own kind on a different boat. They will also be saved by other animals.

Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis doesn’t explain everything. He also doesn’t even attempt for hyperrealism. As he explained after the screening, without the hand of humans, these animals would have matted hair that would move in clumps. This film has a gorgeous, intense painterly feel. We don’t have to see every little hair or whisker on these animals. The cat moves the best. The animation of the Golden Retriever doesn’t always feel like an exuberant dog. There’s some stiffness there. The stiffness works fine for the capybara. The lemur is almost comical, but the humor is gentle here. The other main character here is the water. The water can be deceptively serene, but also dangerously fast when it crashes through the forest. Even what seems like a zen-like contemplatively quiet deep water can slowly become dangerous.

The director chose to use the software Blender and rendered in EEVEE. Besides the animation, the film depends upon the original music by Richards Zalupe and Zilbalodis. The movement and the sound provide more than enough sensory information to elicit emotional reactions.

This is a lovely film that will charm animal lovers and inform filmmakers and video content creators on how important sound design (music, sound effects, etc.) truly is.

The film won the Best Original Music for a Feature Film (Zalupe and Zilbalodis), the Jury Award for a Feature Film, the Audience Award for Best Feature and the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024. It was selected as the Latvian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.