Critics reviews

Maybe the reason Flow feels like a video game is because its precursors are classic, immersive, gentle, and exploratory video games like Myst or Outer Wilds or – more recently – the similarly feline-themed Stray. Zilbalodis isn’t trying to emulate Pixar or DreamWorks, eschewing anthropomorphic hijinks for something that is both more identifiable yet strange. It’s almost the film that the early, dialogue-free trailers for The Wild Robot promised, where being free from the burden of human words brings it closer to the heart.

“Flow,”... shimmers with the essence of life and the spirit of selfless cooperation. Its narrative clarity makes its fable seem timeless, while innovating and expanding the visual immersion of its medium.

“Flow” is animated in a style that suggests that Gints Zilbalodis plays, and loves, a lot of video games. The simplistic character designs, the bright lighting, the environments filled with tall structures in the distance to keep us oriented. The nature of the world is revealed in action and detail. Its immensity is contrasted with the smallness of the characters, highlighting a breathtaking sense of scale.

A breathtakingly beautiful to behold film, Flow tells a story that might well enchant children with its cuddly heroes, but it will rattle grown-ups who can understand the cause for their deadly dilemma.

The pleasures of Flow come from the expressiveness of its animals, whose personalities come through so distinctively that, blessed absence of celeb voices aside, it becomes a fun game to start casting the actors who would play each type if they were human.

It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful.

A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too.

Though initially revolving around the attention to detail that takes center stage when creating a world of silent naturalism, the script from Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža sometimes overpowers the incredible showcase of light, color, and movement with out-of-place cartoonishness.

The film’s presentation will invite video game comparisons... Yet, Flow doesn’t feel like most games because its images speak for themselves, with the lack of exposition (like, say, graffiti or diaries revealing what happened to humanity) allowing the film to maintain a brisk, compelling pace.

Flow’s immersive, in-the-moment aesthetic (another quality it shares with video games) sets it apart from its more lavish studio peers... Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.

[I]t’s Zilbalodis’s methodology and the animation that makes Flow feel so sophisticated, testing the limits of how we project human emotion onto animals in a film and quietly ruminating on the permanent damage we’ve inflicted on the planet.

Both an ode to the loyalty and resilience of animals and a testament to the power of friendship, Flow is more of a feeling than it is a film. Life is short but it’s also beautiful, and Gints Zilbalodis manages to make us experience it all in the present, reminding us that it should be lived to the fullest.