Flow: the Oscar^®-winning cat’s miaow.

A black cat perched atop a rapidly submerging statue of itself might sound like a heavy-handed metaphor for feline solipsism, but Flow infuses the moment with a melancholy poignancy as the water continues rising and the last vestiges of the cat’s world are washed away. No words. No actions. Just the quiet, dawning realisation that nothing will ever be the same again.

Gints Zilbalodis doesn’t so much direct Flow as conjure it, one aching brushstroke at a time, using the big screen as a canvas. After an all-too-brief bucolic prelude, the film unfolds in the aftermath of something we never see but immediately understand: a world, once shaped by supposedly but not assuredly human hands, now eerily devoid of them. Cities have crumbled, artefacts are scattered like driftwood, and nature isn’t so much reclaiming the earth as calmly observing its new shape. Whether it was Earth is beside the point – it feels familiar, and feels forgotten.

Our feline protagonist – stoic, skittish, and gloriously un-anthropomorphised – anchors a film that trades chatter for movement, companionship for communion. As the floodwaters surge, the cat clambers aboard an abandoned sailboat steered by a capybara with the unflappable energy of a retired sea captain. Their odd little crew grows with the addition of a loyal Labrador, a kleptomaniac lemur, and a wounded secretary bird. What might have been a Noah’s Ark of archetypes in a less skilfully sketched story becomes something sharper, warmer, and far less tidy: a found family adrift in a painter’s dream of a world washing itself clean.

The film’s visual style leans hard into texture and tone. Each frame has the lived-in feel of a sketchbook soaked through, dried out, and repurposed as a chronicle of loss. Forests drift past like submerged memories; city skylines tilt and vanish beneath the waterline without ceremony. The colour palette shifts from soft twilight to bruised dusk with emotional precision, and the animals – wordless throughout – communicate more with a glance or tilt of the head than a dozen pages of dialogue or a jaunty musical number might have done.

Flow may technically be animated, but it never behaves like a cartoon. Its storytelling grammar is cinematic in the purest sense, eschewing exposition in favour of tone, tempo, and trust. It understands that movement carries meaning and that stillness, when it comes, ought to be earned. And so the story flows, not like a plotted journey, but like a current – sometimes meandering, sometimes crashing forward, always drawing you inexorably downstream.

There are moments of real peril, yes – predators, storms, accidents – but Flow never stoops to melodrama. Its tension is elemental, not manufactured. This isn’t just a survival story, or a metaphysical impressionist retelling of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. It’s something quieter, and perhaps more resonant: a meditation on interdependence. A reminder that the flood may wash away the world you knew, but not your capacity to connect or a need for connection.

It’s no surprise Flow took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Not because it ticks boxes – it doesn’t – but because it does something far harder: it whispers something true. Without ever raising its voice, it asks you to watch closely, to feel deeply, and to stay afloat. It’s animation as a true artform, not an exercise in commercial four-quadrant appeal. It trusts you to bring your own meaning to the journey, and leaves you changed, even if only slightly, by the time you return to shore.