Flow (2024) Review: A Cat Adrift in a Drowned World

Is Flow worth watching?

Yes. Flow is a small miracle of an animated film, a wordless survival story about a cat in a flooded world that is by turns thrilling, funny and deeply moving. Gints Zilbalodis tells it entirely through movement, sound and light, and the animals behave with such observed precision that their emotions read without a line of dialogue. The only real reservations are some slightly game-like character textures and a dreamlike ambiguity that will leave viewers who want clear answers a little adrift.

What is Flow about?

Flow begins with a lone dark-grey cat living a wary, independent life in a forest near an abandoned house. There are signs everywhere that people once lived here, but none appear. Then the water starts to rise, and the cat’s home disappears under a great flood.

To survive, the cat ends up aboard a drifting sailboat with other displaced animals: a placid capybara, a ring-tailed lemur with a hoarder’s instincts, a good-natured dog and a tall, imperious secretarybird. None of them speaks, and none of them is anthropomorphised in the usual cartoon way. The journey takes them through drowned forests, ruined cities and landscapes that shift between the natural and the mystical, and the question of how these very different creatures learn to cooperate becomes the heart of the film.

Directed by Gints Zilbalodis, Flow is a production from Latvia with no dialogue at all. It premiered at Cannes in 2024, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was also nominated for Best International Feature Film. It runs under an hour and a half.

Animals, not cartoons

The film’s most remarkable achievement is its refusal to cheat. The cat does not smile, wink or talk. It flattens its ears, freezes, bolts, hisses and hesitates, exactly as a real cat would, and the audience learns to read it the way pet owners learn to read theirs. The dog’s eager clumsiness, the capybara’s unflappable calm and the lemur’s jittery acquisitiveness are all drawn from real behaviour, and much of the humour comes from simple recognition.

That naturalism makes the emotional moments hit harder. When the cat takes a risk for another animal, it matters because the film has spent so long establishing how deeply cautious it is. Cooperation is not declared as a moral; it is earned through dozens of small, wordless choices.

A drowned world rendered with wonder

Zilbalodis builds his world with long, fluid camera movements that swoop and glide as if the camera were floating on the water. The environments are the film’s glory: sunlit forests, flooded stone cities, colossal statues and vast skies, all lit with a painterly softness. The water itself is almost a character, sometimes gentle, sometimes violent, and always beautifully animated.

The score, which Zilbalodis co-composed, and the sound design do the work that dialogue usually handles. Real animal sounds, creaking wood and lapping water give the film an immersive texture, and the music swells only when the story has earned it.

Where the style shows its seams

Flow was made on a comparatively modest scale, and occasionally it shows. The animal models can look smooth and slightly game-like in close-up, especially next to the richness of the backgrounds. The film’s refusal to explain its world is mostly a strength, but its more mystical passages are open to interpretation in a way that will frustrate viewers who want every question answered. Young children may also find some of the flood sequences genuinely frightening.

Who should watch Flow?

It is a rare animated film that works equally well for children, cat lovers and serious film fans, and it is an ideal gateway to wordless and art-house animation. The short running time makes it easy to fit in, but it rewards a large screen and good sound. There is peril, danger from other animals and moments of sadness, though nothing graphic; most children of primary school age and up will cope, with a parent nearby for the stormier scenes.

For more animation in a similar spirit:

• Robot Dreams, another dialogue-free animated feature that finds huge emotion in a friendship between non-human characters.
• The Wild Robot, a bigger studio film about animals and survival that shared Flow’s awards season.
• Spirited Away, for a hand-drawn classic that treats water, mystery and ruins with a similar sense of wonder.

The verdict

Flow proves that an animated film can dispense with dialogue, stars and even humans and still be one of the most affecting stories of its year. A few rough edges in the character animation and some deliberate ambiguity are the only blemishes on a film of rare beauty and emotional precision.

Rating: 4.4/5