“Flow” An Innovative, Emotional Animated Journey
- Matt Palmer
- Apr 22, 2025
- 4 min read
The Dietrich Theater Spring Film Festival kicks off this Friday with several arthouse/independent films and documentaries. For the festival, I plan on checking out quite a few of the selections and most of those film festival reviews you can see in the May 7th and 14th editions!
So, to kick things off for the upcoming festival, I took a look at the animated film that beat out Netflix’s “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” “Inside Out 2” and even the amazing “The Wild Robot”: “Flow.”
A wondrous journey through realms natural and mystical, “Flow” follows a courageous cat after his home is devastated by a great flood. Teaming up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird and a dog to navigate a boat in search of dry land, they must rely on trust, courage, and wits to survive the perils of a newly aquatic planet.
From the imagination of director Gints Zilbalodis comes a thrilling animated spectacle as well as a profound meditation on the fragility of the environment and the spirit of friendship and community. Steeped in the soaring possibilities of visual storytelling, “Flow” is a feast for the senses and a treasure for the heart.
The Spring Film Festival selection “Flow” is an incredible animated journey that delivers imaginative animation and an astounding look at a few characters who are trying to survive.
“Flow” is a breathtaking unique animated feature that actually proves that amazing storytelling doesn’t need words to be deeply emotional. This film, instead of using traditional voice work like other animated films, uses the animal’s real noises. That is one of the many things that made “Flow” so incredibly unique and the filmmakers really knocked it out of the park with this film.
By using the animals true natural noises, it added to the depth and emotion for the story. The bond between the animals feels completely genuine and we also feel for them as they struggle through survival, companionship and hope. As the animals are trying to survive, their bond really grows and they get extremely close, unlike how they were towards the beginning.
Their journey can get rather emotional as you follow the animals during some perilous situations. This engaging film also delivers quite a few moments where you can get rather emotional as we follow the cat. Before watching this film, I didn’t think “Flow” would be so moving and now I can see how this film beat out the main competition at this year’s Oscars.
“Flow” is a breath-taking animated independent film that is visually astounding and the film’s story itself is simply heart-warming.
Trivia: In 2012, director Gints Zilbelodis produced “Aqua,” a short film about a cat overcoming its fear of the ocean. The premise of that short film served as the basis of “Flow.” Production started in 2018, and it took Zilbelodis and his production team five and a half years to complete this film.
“Flow” premiered on May 22, 2024 at the Cannes Film Festival in the “Un Certain Regard” section. Not only did the film win a Best Animated Feature Oscar, it also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
MPA: Rated PG for peril and thematic elements (running time 85 minutes)
The show dates and times for “Flow” during the Spring Film Festival are as follows: Saturday April 26 at 12 pm; Friday May 2 at 2:30 pm; Saturday May 10 at 4:30 pm; Thursday May 15 at 12 pm.
The team was very adamant in getting all of the "voices" to be done by real animals, so they recorded real animals for the movie. To get the capybara sound, the sound engineer had to travel to a zoo and tickle capybaras. However, the real capybara sounds did not match the personality that the capybara character would have, so instead they used a baby camel for this one.
The entire movie has been created and rendered only using the free and open-source software Blender.
Because the budget of the film was so tight, there are no deleted scenes from the film. Every scene produced is in the final cut of the movie.
The first independent film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
The animals shown are from a wide variety of locations in real life. Since the movie doesn't take place in our time, or possibly even our world, it is assumed this is intentional. The secretary bird is from the African savanna: the ring-tailed lemur from Madagascar; the capybara from South America; and even a few spotted axis deer from India.
There are no words spoken, only the animals' respective sounds.
Flow was selected to premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It also screened at the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival a month later, where it was won the Jury Award, the Audience Award, and the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution, all in the Feature Film category.
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