Oscars Cartoon Watch: Flow (2024)

Watched:  01/27/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gints Zibalodis

If you want to know what moves me and can make me want to cry for the entire runtime of a movie - put an animal in danger.  Especially an animal with personality that manages to still recognizably act like an animal.

I'd heard a few trusted sources gives a thumbs-up to Flow (2024), and then it got nominated for a 2025 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.  And, yes.  Consider this the highest level of recommendation I'm likely to give a movie for pretty mush anyone and everyone.  Go watch Flow.  

This post will be short.  I loved this movie so much, I don't want to ramble on and I don't want to spoil it.

In a world in which humanity seems to have ceased existing fairly recently, a gray cat has managed to do just fine, living in her old house and surviving the various threats of the wild around her.  She outruns the local pack of dogs (including a friendly yellow lab who just wants to be friends) and avoids a secretarybird.  

However, suddenly, the river the cat lives near rises, a wall of water comes pouring through, the levels rising constantly until the cat seeks shelter from what was her home, standing atop a statue while a boat drifts toward her.  A single capybara is aboard.  They soon befriend the Lemur again, and the yellow lab.  And, eventually, the Secretarybird.  

Adventures occur.  A whale seems to follow them.  Land and food seem distant dreams.  

The animals are animated naturally, they only make the sounds they'd make in real life.  The art style is like a painted storybook, beautifully rendered - like the Spider-Verse movies, any single frame could be pulled out and be wall-art in your home.  

What's remarkable is that this is no Incredible Journey with animals speaking to one another - not with dialog, anyway.  And, yet, the movie has some of the best rendered characters and arcs you're like to see in a movie.   Sometimes we forget that film is a visual medium, and we rely so much on witty chatter - and, yes, we expect humans to talk.  But for those of us who share space with animals, we know that there's a whole other world and language going on with our friends.  The film's ability to keep the animals within a certain level of believability, while also conveying how they relate to one another, find friendship and come to understand their little collective - and their own weaknesses - is something to behold.

I know the team at Disney/ Pixar will be watching this, and I generally don't worry about them much, anyway.  But when I think about my bad experience with other animated movies this year, I'd suggest those animation companies take a copy of this movie, watch it twice, and then sit with themselves a while before they start on their next film.

This film is, I believe, a Latvian/ French collaboration (I can be told otherwise and won't be surprised).  And so far from the wacky, hyper-speed antics of what we think we need in animation these days, it's mind-boggling.  But I think there's something in what can be told when we strip away the gags, and what can appeal to people when we lean into stories working on an almost instinctual level - sometimes maybe thinking about how to tell a story at it's most primal level is a good way to get to the core of what we care about.

I'm going to be thinking about Flow for a long time to come.  Just a remarkable achievement in animation, storytelling and character.  And, man, the score...