In Positive Psychology the term Flow is ‘a cognitive state where one is completely immersed in an activity — from painting and writing to prayer and surfboarding. It involves intense focus, creative engagement, and the loss of awareness of time and self.’
Flow is also a 2024 animated movie, winner of the 2025 Oscar for Best Animated Feature film, produced in Latvia by Gints Zilbalodis. In it we follow a Cat, first of all fleeing from a flooding river, then riding in a small abandoned boat down that river to the sea. There is already a capybara in that boat, and then a Secretary Bird, Labrador and Lemur join them. We are given no explanation as to why there are no human beings to be seen, though they have clearly existed there recently; nor how animals from South America, mainland Africa and Madagascar are together in this lush landscape; or where the film is set. The river takes them to an ancient city with architecture that looked similar to some in Northern India, close by what might be volcanic plug hills, tall and narrow, They also encounter a huge Leviathan, a whale like creature.
So many puzzles, so few answers, and yet, just like the Cat, we go with the flow, completely immersed in the story. I say story, but there is not much plot. Things just happen. Events flow in ways that seem entirely natural, but not didactic.
The animals are hardly anthropomorphised. They do not behave like humans. I was however frequently reminded how we humans often behave like other animals. Flow also reminded me that we often describe human beings who act in ways that are vicious, cruel or savage as being ‘like animals’, whereas some of us acknowledge that humans can be the truly vicious, cruel and savage species. The creatures in Flow are not noble or heroic, but they do slowly learn that they are safer together than apart.
There is, I think, only one way in which they demonstrate a skill that did not fit well with their natural capacities and limitations, but that did not distract me.
The visual style of the animation rarely reminded me of any other film, though sometimes Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell anime came to mind, and at one point the Leviathan in Flow leaping out of the water echoed Ang Lee’s whale in The Life of Pi. What is certainly true is that I joyfully went ‘with the flow’.
The beautiful images, created by the producer/director Zilbalodis using the open-source software Blender, the music, which he co-composed, along with the tiny but cumulative details as these creatures slowly adapt to their situation and company, were more than enough beguile and carry me forward. Cat’s journey is both interior and exterior, learning more and more about what it is to simply be.
Three films I have really enjoyed seen in the last year or so seemed to me to be unique. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, Jacques’s Emilia Perez and Zilbalodis’ Flow. Each of these reminded me that most films are best made for the cinema, not for streaming, because the immersive cinema, or Movie House, is the place where they are most likely to evoke flow, a state of ‘self-forgetfulness’, overcoming our distractions, reaching past our defences and reminding our hearts and minds what it is to be human.
