Flow (PG)
Break Room of Geeks; Criterion; IMDb; official website (Latvia); Rotten Tomatoes; Sacrebleu; Take Five; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Fandango

This 2024 movie is a Latvian-French-Belgian co-production. I watched it in 2026. It won the 2024 Oscar and Golden Globe awards for best animated feature film. The film has no dialogue because there are no humans in the movie, just animals making ordinary animal sounds. I thought the animation was stunning, and the animals looked as realistic as possible, given the animation style. They all had distinct, believable personalities, despite not talking.

It begins with a wandering cat, who gets chased by a pack of dogs. The pursuit is interrupted by a stampede of deer, who are running from an oncoming wave that sweeps up the cat and dogs, though they soon make it back to dry land. One of the dogs, a Labrador Retriever, follows the cat back to its home, which seems to have been abandoned by its human owner. There are cat statues all around the outside of the house. Before long, the water starts rising, eventually covering the house. The dog joins the other dogs on a passing boat, and the cat climbs to the top of a huge cat statue. As the water continues to rise, the cat jumps onto another passing boat, which is already occupied by a capybara. (When I watched the trailer for the movie some time ago, I could swear I thought the capybara was a dog, and probably even thought it was the same dog (the Labrador) that appeared later in the trailer. It's weird, the tricks your eyes can play when scenes go by so quickly.)

Well, I don't want to say too much about the plot, such as it is. But the cat and capybara are joined on the boat at various points by a ring-tailed lemur, the Labrador, and a secretarybird (a species with which I was unfamiliar). Later still, they're joined by the other dogs that had chased the cat. There's one point where the cat was on land, surrounded by a ring of deer, and I was pretty sure that was a dream. I was right. But there's a scene later in the movie involving the cat and the secretarybird, which suddenly got surreal, so I wondered if that was also a dream, but it wasn't. There's no explanation for what happens, which is fine. I don't feel a pressing need to understand everything that happens in the movie. (After I watched the movie, I watched Break Room of Geeks's review of the film, from several months earlier, and she talked a bit about magical realism in the movie, which hadn't occurred to me, but I guess I agree with that assessment.) Speaking of which, there are also various points where we see a sort of whale, but it doesn't look like any extant species of whale. So that was interesting. I should also mention that there's no clear indication of when or where in the world the movie takes place. There are some structures (as well as the boats) which must have been made by humans, but there's no indication of how long the humans have been gone. Some people seem to think this is a post-apocalyptic movie, and that seems to me to be entirely possible. But I still wondered if there are no humans left in the entire world, or just none in this particular area. I also wanted to say that there was one point where I wondered if the cat was somehow intentionally steering the boat with the rudder, but I wasn't sure it knew what it was doing. However, over time it becomes clear that all the animals on the boat understand how to steer it, which seemed a bit odd to me. Did they just figure it out by watching what happened when they turned the rudder control, or... were they actually smarter than the animals of today? A bit more evolved, perhaps, or maybe they were like the rats of NIMH? Probably I'm overthinking it, though. Animals are smart enough to figure out simple cause and effect, I guess.

And... I don't think there was too much more I wanted to say. I did like how the main group of animals (cat, capybara, lemur, secretarybird, and Labrador) all learned to be sort of friends, and to work together (mostly). I liked how the story flowed organically just as the boat flowed on the water, constantly bringing new events for the characters to experience. You never really know what's going to happen next, and I don't think it ever gets boring, even without dialogue and with a relatively simplistic plot. I guess I liked how it ended, though I'm not sure how much I liked it. I think it was kind of sweet, and possibly sort of symbolic, but still a bit anticlimactic. But I can't really imagine how else to have ended it. I should also say there's a brief post-credits scene, which I'm not sure how to interpret. But it was nice, anyway. So, yeah, overall it's just a beautiful movie (both visually and emotionally), and I liked the personalities and interactions of all the characters. And I think that's all I have to say.