Oscar-winning Flow is a timeless tale of survival to delight all cat lovers

Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis finds poignancy in the simplest ways

When this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature were announced, Flow’s director Gints Zilbalodis posted a clip of himself reacting to the nominations. (Months later, he would go on to win the award.) In the video, Zilbalodis is watching from his bedroom, his yellow labrador by his side, not another soul in sight. At the mention of his film, he smiles and mumbles a few words to his companion.

But dogs can’t speak our language or comprehend the notion of industry recognition. So, instead, Zilbalodis simply nestles his head into the animal’s side, speaking in terms that his pet can understand and, in turn, they gently nuzzle him back. It’s a beautiful, simple, wordless moment – as beautiful, simple, and wordless as Flow, which the Latvian filmmaker created entirely on the free-to-use open-source software Blender, relying only on a small team of animators and a minuscule budget of $3.7m (£2.8m).

That it went on to win the Oscar feels monumental for computer animation as a medium. With Flow, Zilbalodis developed the painterly style he deployed in his 2019 debut Away – a look that’s taken root of late in the indie gaming scene, with the likes of Abzu and Journey. Here, Zilbalodis pushes it into a place that feels instinctively cinematic. It’s proof there’s not only one direction to take, and that Hollywood’s fixation on photorealism and A-list voice actors isn’t absolute.

Flow opens with a slate-grey cat inspecting their own reflection in a puddle. The water itself is completely lifelike while the cat slinks around, flicks their ears, and dilates their golden pupils in a perfect imitation of reality. But their fur is impressionistically rendered, allowing the film to find an ideal balance between technical proficiency (on a limited budget) and the soft, pretty sort of imagery that invokes peace, calm, and meditation. Each hair or blade of grass need not be so defined.

The cat nestles at night into a large, but notably empty bed, in what we can presume is an artist’s studio. In every corner, there are sketches, carvings, and statues of what was once a beloved pet. But humanity has abandoned the world of Flow, whether by eradication or migration – our only hint at our collective fate in this story are the rapidly rising flood waters that force the cat to leave their safe perch and embark on a journey of survival.

Our feline is rescued, at the very last moment, by a boat unexpectedly captained by a lethargic capybara. Later, they’re joined by a bouncing yellow labrador (seemingly modelled on Zilbalodis’s own); a stoic secretary bird; and an anxious lemur hauling a hoard of treasures. We grasp these characteristics not because the animals tell us so. They communicate only in squawks, chirps, meows, and barks, all recorded from real creatures (though the capybara is, in fact, voiced by a baby camel, out of fear that audiences would find the actual animal’s strained cries a little disconcerting).

Their journey isn’t overly eventful. They explore a flooded city and have a run-in with a whale; there’s something else, more enigmatic, and spiritual at play, too, hinted at by cosmic colours in the sky. But the cat’s distrustful yowls start to soften as they learn that survival depends on community, and that even if dogs seem obtrusive and lemurs seem fussy, kindness and charity can be expressed in many different forms. Flow is a testament to all that can be achieved when we work as one.

Dir: Gints Zilbalodis. U, 84 minutes.