Everybody is raving about Flow, the Latvian animated film that recently won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars and was also nominated for Best International Feature Film.

In a current cinematic landscape oversaturated with AI-generated and hyper-realistic animation — often voiced by celebrities and punctuated with bursts of contemporary pop music — Flow stands out as a refreshing oddity by embracing a radically different approach to animation.

A survivalist drama set in a post-apocalyptic world, Flow follows a ragtag group of animals led by a lone cat. The film is entirely devoid of dialogue, with animal sounds sourced from real recordings. Its characters, created with Blender (a powerful free and open-source 3D animation suite) have a low-poly, blocky aesthetic that evokes nostalgia for the CD-ROM video games of the early 2000s.

Directed and written by Gints Zilbalodis, the film beautifully contrasts its retro, polygonal character designs with lush, painterly backdrops: sun-dappled forests, rustling leaves, vast skies and light filtering through the trees in a way that feels almost meditative. This visual serenity is heightened by the dramatic, soul-stirring score from Gints Zilbalodis and Rihards Zaļupe.

One of the film’s greatest delights is how it captures animal movement. The protagonist cat, despite its video game-like design, immediately earns the audience’s empathy with its piercing yellow eyes. Its movements —arching its back, sprinting across landscapes, slinking through shadows, blinking curiously and prowling like a hunter — feel remarkably realistic, almost as if rotoscoped from a real cat.

The cinematography leans heavily on motivated POV to draw the audience into the animal’s perspective. When the cat turns its head, the camera follows its gaze and seamlessly pans to reveal what it sees. This dynamic, character-driven framing makes the viewer feel both like an observer and an active participant, much like scanning a game’s environment with a mouse in the 1990s.

Flow never explains what happened to humanity, but climate change seems the likely culprit. Civilization is in ruins, and only the animals remain. In a way, the film seems weary of humans and instead draws us into the simplicity of a world inhabited only by real animals — ones that don’t sound like Amy Poehler or Bill Hader, or dance like Matthew McConaughey.