Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow (Straume), which won the Oscar for Best Animated Film last year, is a marvel of technical ingenuity, formal beauty, and a 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 animal 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 own, seemingly effortless in the way it moves among setpieces that are sometimes staggering, sometimes immensely moving. It is hypnotic in its beauty, playful in its storytelling, and profound in its implications.

The film begins with a big-eared, wide-eyed black cat in a primordial forest, which is alive with all kinds of animal life—rabbits, birds, butterflies, deer, a roving pack of dogs. Although there are no humans to be found anywhere, there is copious evidence that there was once human life, as the cat lives in an abandoned house surrounded by various feline statues, some of which are not much bigger than it is and some of which tower like skyscrapers (this is our first indication that the world, while strikingly familiar, is otherworldly). One afternoon, while running from the aforementioned pack of dogs, the cat is caught in a sudden flood that materializes from nowhere—a wall of water that rushes into the forest, flooding the lower levels and then slowly, but relentlessly rising. The cat winds up in a sailboat, where his companions are a capybara and one of the dogs that was earlier chasing him. The capybara is resolutely unbothered by the catastrophic circumstances, and the dog generally just wants to play.

From there, the story progresses like a dream, following the three unlikely animals, who are later joined by a collection-minded lemur and an injured secretary bird, as they struggle to stay alive in the dangerous new flooded world in which they find themselves. There are moments of panic and terror, but also moments of salvation and self-sacrifice. The animals’ behavior remains decidedly animalistic (anyone who has ever had a cat will immediately recognize the close attention to detail the animators have paid to all the fine details and quirks of feline behavior), but there is also room for stretches of imagination, such as the fact that the animals—especially the bird—figure out how to maneuver the boat’s rudder. (It is worth noting, too, that all the animals are “voiced” by real animals, not voice actors mimicking animal sounds, which is decidedly impactful in how real the story feels.)

Co-writer/director Gints Zilbalodis, a Latvian filmmaker whose previous feature, Away (Projān, 2019), was also a wordless survival tale, has an intuitive sense of what grabs you emotionally and how distinctly compelling visuals can be. He spent five years making Flow, funding it independently and composing the entire film with Blender, a free, open-source 3D computer graphics program. While the characters do not have the same fine detail and photorealistic textures of a Pixar film, they feel exactly right for the film, as their expressiveness and tenacity come through even if we can’t count each individual hair on their bodies. The world they inhabit is gorgeously rendered like a moving painting, and Zilbalodis pays especially close attention to the sheen of water, the ethereal light of the setting sun, and the power of reflections. The result is a film that is both magisterial and intimate, emotionally rich and unexpectedly funny, constantly surprising and thoughtful in its ambiguity—a pure delight and one of the best films of the year.

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