Gints Zilbalodis's Flow (Straume), which recently won the Oscar for Best Animated Film, is a marvel of technical ingenuity, formal beauty, and deep reverence for life. Completely devoid of dialogue and yet rich in character and meaning, it evokes a world inexplicably on the verge of Biblical destruction as the backdrop for a survival story among an unlikely group of animals who, far from being anthropomorphized and simplified, retain their raw dignity while also offering compelling portraits of the best of human qualities. Both a fantastical metaphor and a suspenseful drama, Flow exists in a category of its ... Read More