Last night, the fantasy adventure Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. This dialogue-free drama follows a cat, forced to travel far from home in unfamiliar company when an ecological disaster submerges the earth in flood waters.
At the start of the film it appears that the cat lives with a besotted artist who pays tribute to the feline with sculptures of diverse sizes. But even this ailurophile human has abandoned the home, and their pet. As the waters rise and rise, our formerly cosseted hero must learn to survive and make common cause with a ragtag crew comprising a capybara, a secretary bird, a dog and a ring-tailed lemur. Against the odds, the animals have to save themselves from a manmade catastrophe.
Genuine peril? You’ve got it. And copious amounts of eerily serene beauty in the newly drowned world. The animation style is computer-based, which gives it that slightly flat aspect, reminiscent of gaming, but clearly intentional. The creativity of the film, the depth of the characterisation, bring the animal gang to life.
Latvian animator Zilbalodis, who previously made his films solo, collaborated with a team this time around, in order to make this feature so grand, so vast, so complex in its world-building. It is a remarkable and beautiful film and naturally, owing to its animal cast, entirely without dialogue. The storytelling is fluid and the atmosphere immersive.
In common with many people whom I have seen posting to similar effect on social media, I can report that my cat Elsie was captivated from start to finish. If you can’t watch it with a cat, I am sure viewing it in the cinema would be incredible. Flow is released in UK cinemas on 21 March 2025, though there do seem to be previews, if you cannot wait that long.
And speaking of more immediate gratification, if the name Gints Zilbalodis rings a bell, that may be because you saw his previous dialogue-free animation Away, on its original release in 2020. I reviewed the film later in the year, and I really loved it.
“I couldn’t let 2020 go by without talking to you about Away, a truly remarkable animated feature, and a modern silent too. This deceptively simple quest film has zero dialogue, and was all, every frame, the work of one man, Latvian filmmaker animator Gints Zilbalodis. He wrote, directed, scored and yes animated this award-winning film over the course of three and a half years…”
Away is coming back to UK and Irish cinemas on 14 March, so now you have the perfect opportunity to immerse yourself in the engrossing, and very special world of Zilbalodis’s animation.
