Animated animals that finally don’t talk are the stars of this Latvian Oscar submission for Best International Feature, as a Noah’s Ark-type flood envelopes the world in this compelling and communal survival-adventure.

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Forget about the Madagascar movies or Zootopia, if you love animated animals on an adventure, Flow is the real deal to seek out. 

Officially submitted to the 2025 Oscars for Best International Feature by Latvia, Flow will please any kind of viewer, be it families with boisterous kids, elitist arthouse snobs or everyone in between. 

Completely free of dialogue, well because in Gints Zilbalodis’ work, animals rightly don’t speak—they are simply themselves, or what humans have perceived of their ‘personalities’. 

There is a black cat that is solitary and occasionally overconfident; a happy-go-lucky dog desiring companionship; a kind and resourceful capybara, a vain hoarder that is the ring-tailed lemur; and a secretarybird that is ostracised by its kind. 

Together, they must survive a ginormous Noah’s Ark-type flood that has enveloped the world.  So, onwards they sail by wind on a tiny boat, on the lookout for land. 

Animated via Blender, a free and open-source software, Flow relies heavily on the standard beats of the survival-adventure movie.  In that sense, there is nothing particularly new, but what is exciting and compelling is the innate interest to follow these animals into the unknown. 

Humans are nowhere to be found, probably dead, or worst, extinct, so each species represents aspects of the human race that have been left behind in these animals, traits that are both desirable and undesirable as reflected and communicated with nary a need for words—well, because we know and wield them by heart. 

Every look and gesture tells us something about ourselves, yet Flow also operates instinctually, that is to say, every animal reacts naturally in good and bad times. 

Obviously, the film alludes to the nightmarish scenario of rapidly rising seawater, but while we witness an ecological disaster of epic proportions unfold and some way-too-unbelievable luck experienced, particularly by the cat (well, don’t they have nine lives?), Zilbalodis keeps the heart of the story intimate and communal.

Grade: A-

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