A philosophical animated film about animals in peril?  This thoughtfully conceived, beautifully-crafted winner for Best Animated Film gives us something new in a genre dominated by safe family fare with jokes and songs: a rumination on the life struggle in an unstable world. Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis builds a fascinating fantasy environment, in which a small group of animals cooperate to survive. From what we can see, Man appears to be extinct, but even that interpretation is up for debate. It’s an existential ‘what happens next?’ puzzle picture that weaves a satisfying spell of enchantment.

Flow
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1278
2024 / Color / 2:00 widescreen / 85 min. / Straume / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 23, 2025 / 49.95
Concept Artist, Graphic Designer: Paula Bobrova
Animation Supervisor, Animation director: Pierre Mosquet, Léo Silly Pélissier
Music Composers: Rihards Zalupe, Gints Zilbalodis
Screenplay Written by Gints Zilbalodis, Matiss Kaza, Ron Dyens
Produced by Ron Dyens, Matiss Kaza, Gregory Zalcman, Gints Zilbalodis
Cinematography, Art Director, Editor, Directed by Gints Zilbalodis

Wow, this picture impresses us from every angle. The Oscar winner for best Animated Feature, it was a major winner in a field usually dominated by 2 or 3 corporate-owned outfits, led by Disney, of course. The main exceptions have been when something special from Japan get extra attention. 2024’s Flow has almost zero in common with what we’ve come to expect in this now major field of commercial filmmaking. It’s not a family-oriented comedy, or a musical fairy tale, or the umpteenth iteration of a franchise Too Big to Die. We have a dreaded feeling that Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King will be remade in perpetuity, cycling between animated feature, live-action feature, and a stage musical.

Flow is an independent feature from Latvia. Language-wise, it’s a universal product … there is no dialogue, so there’s less need for multiple versions beyond putting titles on that say ‘directed by’ instead of ‘Režisors.’ It’s a story about animals, pitched in a different way than we expect. They’re both realistic and partly stylized with anthropomorphic traits … just one or two. The animals certainly don’t talk. As the show also does without narration, it plays as a first-person account, much of it ‘in real time,’ where we must pay close attention to What Happens Next.

Well, yes and no. Flow might not be appropriate for kids that can’t handle uncertainty, especially in scenes of jeopardy. Our curiosity grows with every scene. We are never given a handle on exactly where we are. The animals are familiar, but they don’t belong on any particular continent. The world they live in looks like Earth, but it might not be. They simply react as best they can to an upheaval of ‘normality’ that makes everything seem very insecure. I know children that will be enchanted by this, and others that would demand constant explanations for the unexplainable. The only good answer is to ‘shut up, watch and find out.’

Even as an (occasionally) mature adult, I found myself perplexed by Flow.  I should have simply re-read the title. When seemingly inconsistent or contradictory things happen, we naturally reach for logical explanations. As evidenced by a second feature included on Criterion’s 4K disc, director Gints Zilbalodis’s modus operandi is to frame reality as a progression, an unfolding series of changes and discoveries, few of which offer easy explanations.

The adventure of the nameless cat doesn’t follow a set pattern; it doesn’t even pretend to teach a lesson. Nobody tells us what to think. But the show does end up having something to say. It’s a very satisfying feeling, and it comes out of the story itself.

Our synopsis doesn’t cover much, as part of the reward of viewing is to react to new developments as they occur. A young cat lives in a wooded glen, apparently by himself. It sleeps in what looks like a recently abandoned wooden house — the human bed it sleeps on still looks reasonably tidy. Where are the people in this world?  We see bits and pieces of contemporary buildings, but also an entire ancient city. We see no roads or anything written.

The cat is almost immediately on the run, because flood waves enter its wood, followed by fast-rising water that soon inundates everything it might call home. The cat and several other animals eventually co-habit a small sailboat, that at first just drifts with the flowing water. The animals behave like animals for the most part, with (mellow) animal personalities. Since none of them can comprehend a bigger picture of what’s going on, they just adapt as their situation changes … the boat is the only dry place to be.

It’s not easy to describe what makes the film’s landscapes and sea vistas so special. These environments are breathtakingly beautiful; style-wise, they exist somewhere between animation convention and a more photo-real vision.

Our cat friend at first panics, running from the water but also from a pack of (formerly domesticated?) dogs. A pleasant capybara is even-tempered, inoffensive. It ‘gets along’ with everybody. A ring-tailed lemur is fascinated by the human trinkets it collects, especially a mirror that it stares at constantly. The lemur regards himself with great curiosity, as if trying to formulate a sense of identity consciousness. As we stretch for ‘meanings,’ the lemur makes us think of humans glued to smartphone screens. But Flow resists cookie-cutter interpretations.

A brilliant white secretary bird already seems to have a higher sense of self … it appears to defend the cat, an act that earns it grief from its own flock. The secretary bird also knows how to steer the boat, a skill that the other animals pick up. Yet they don’t start acting like Steamboat Willie. We think, what kind of parable is this anyway?

We’re soon confronted with things that scramble our attempts to ‘explain’ the movie. We see an enormous animal that is straight out of a fantasy, something that could be a monster, or could be benign. The extreme flooding, storms and some very un-Earth-like, weird meteorological phenomena let us know that we definitely are not in Kansas, Toto. Are we seeing an antigravity effect, or the result of a freak air updraft?  Is this some strange alien planet?

The closest thing to this that we’ve read is Jules Verne’s Off on a Comet. Its interplanetary castaways eventually figure out where they are, but for the longest time they must cope with an environment gone absurdly strange. That’s exactly the situation confronting our fellow travelers. They just do what animals have to do in all situations … go with the flow. They aren’t infected by the human delusion that they have some unwritten right to control everything.

The fact that we identify with our four survivalist critters really helps Flow; we’re heavily invested in seeing them come through in one piece. The ending does have a bit of uplift, but no grand moral. It offers the simple idea that social cooperation is better than fang & claw competition. I’m surprised that nobody has declared Flow to be communist propaganda, as has been charged of other movies this year. Nothing is resolved, but the fact that Life Tries to Find a Way is comforting.

I haven’t read enough discussion of Flow’s remarkable style of digital animation. The entire movie has been created and rendered with the free and open-source software  Blender. Each scene/shot is a fantastic complex environment. A description of director Gints Zilbalodis’ story visualization would not use terms like Master Shot, Medium Shot or Close-Up. More often than not, an un-anchored camera glides along without restraint, usually following the movements of the characters. It generally sticks close to what is experienced by the cat, whether it is cringing in fear from an enormous elk herd, or bravely climbing the mast to get a look at the horizon. The camera circles the action without drawing too much attention to itself. We accept the ‘reality’ of a dynamic environment — the flood, the storm, a misty pathway to the top of an impossibly high eyrie.

The characters appear to be modeled from real animals and their movements; the cat is spot-on but we identify even more with the pleasant capybara. Every so often it decides that it’s nap-time, and just flops down like a pile of laundry. The feathers on the secretary bird are constantly becoming stiff and erect, as if the bird must stretch every few seconds. What the mammals don’t have is animated fur, which is par for something from Disney or Pixar. They instead have more graphic-oriented tone patterns, that resemble a posterized effect. It looks good … we don’t feel that we’re seeing something unfinished. The filmmakers seem to be after a look that is Hyper-Real, not Photo-Real. Other clues tell us that the cat is soaking wet, such as its drawn-back ears and shivering shoulders.

The surprise is that we don’t feel frustrated watching Flow, even after spending a lot of effort trying to rationalize what we see. I should think that even youngish children will be drawn into it, as the no-dialogue, you-are-there-good-luck-to-you approach will appeal to them. We think it’s a good idea to present kids with existential challenges, just to suggest the idea that not all problems in Life can be resolved with a menu choice or a wink from Daddy. This cat is on its own … but his cohorts learn to be a cohesive group.

We’re told that in a public square in Riga, Latvia, a statue has been erected to commemorate the cat from this movie. Forget Rocky Balboa, we’re with the cat all the way.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray of Flow is a killer experience on a good 4K setup, a ‘hey come in here and see this’ kind of movie. Criterion tells us that it is a 4K digital transfer, with a 7.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack.

Reading the smaller print on the box lets us know that the disc set also includes Gints Zilbalodis’ first full feature from 2019, called Away. It shares a mysterious locale and perplexing narrative with Flow but has mostly human characters and thus doesn’t engage us on the same level. It’s another stylized maybe-Odyssey on a strange world of things Familiar and Un-. It also is in 4K, so digital animation addicts will be watching to see what director Zilbalodis’ has improved between 2019 and 2024. The text discussing Flow’s workflow refers to the program Blender so frequently, we wonder if various programs will start getting major screen credit: ‘Starring Blender, now with educated pixels.’

We had to sample Flow a second time to appreciate its rich music track, which fits what we see so well that we didn’t think about it enough the first time. Actually, I think I’ll need a third viewing to even be sure about some of my observations above … hopefully not too many are subjective spin-outs.

Criterion disc producer Curtis Tsui (a good guy) has the requisite key-creative interviews, and director commentaries on the feature and several shorter items, including two Zilbalodis short subjects from the ‘teens. But other extras will be must-see viewing for anyone wishing to enter the field of digital animation. In parallel with the theatrical cut is a full feature-length digital animatic for the show, a making-of documentary and an unused shot reel.

The IMDB notes that the film carries 22 separate logos for production entities, mostly sources of funding. Thankfully, most are very brief.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Flow
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent 7.1 surround (don’t ask me)
Supplements:
Audio commentary featuring Zilbalodis
Full feature-length animatic
Interviews with Zilbalodis and cowriter-coproducer Matīss Kaž
Dream Cat (2025), a making-of documentary produced for Latvian Television
Short Zilbalodis films Aqua (2012) and Priorities (2014), with new director commentaries by the director
Unused-shot reel, with new commentary by Zilbalodis
Trailers, TV spots, and teasers
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio
Insert folder with an essay by Nicolas Rapold
Collectible stickers.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 16, 2025
(7407flow)

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