Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024, Latvia/Belgium/France)

In an era in which Pixar seems to have lost its spark, Flow is a breath of fresh air. The film's plot is deceptively simple. As the world is covered with floods, our protagonist - a cat - takes refuge on a boat with a Labrador Retriever, a secretarybird, a lemur, and a capybara. Told entirely without dialogue and created over four-and-a-half years using open-source software Blender, the film follows these animals on their journey, encountering plenty of peril along the way. For cat lovers, especially, Flow is a heartwrenching journey. Those who do not like seeing animals especially cats in peril may do their best to avoid the film.

Director Gints Zilbalodis's film has become the most viewed Latvian film in history, grossing over 50 million on a 3.5 million dollar budget. This makes sense, as the film is not only free from the constraints of language, but the story it tells is a universal one. The film is set not in a specific locale, but in an amalgam of places to the extent that it occupies no single local geography. There are jungles, rainforests, and ancient ruins. Zilbalodis wants to capture a world full of wonder and infinite possibilities, and he does so.

Running at a brief 90 minutes, Flow has a lot for kids to find interesting but just as much for adults. There are deep emotional themes at the core of the film, including sacrificing for what is right and learning your own strengths. Obviously one could extrapolate on the broader meaning of this post-apocalyptic scenario, though there is no explicit political messaging in the film. More than anything else, Flow is beautiful to watch - the animation of the animals in particular captures their unique character and feels both real and imagined. The best kind of animation.

9/10