There’s a lot of chatter these days about the lack of artistically satisfying theatrical films geared specifically for kids — well, parents, look no further.
“Flow,” which adults will love as well, is a spectacular animated film about an adorable cat going on a journey alongside some animal friends after an unexpected flood devastates his home. It’ll open in New York and Los Angeles from Sideshow and Janus Films on November 22, with an expansion wide in approximately 200 theaters on December 6. Watch the trailer for “Flow” above — and exclusively on IndieWire.
The wordless film, which world premiered to raves in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, is one of the great triumphs of character animation in recent memory: Each animal character has uniquely expressive body language to convey their emotions and communicate the narrative — this is not a “talking animal” movie. It relies on the kind of gestural storytelling that the Nine Old Men of Disney fame pioneered in the 1940s by actually studying animals’ movements to capture them precisely, but rendered here in a unique CGI style.
And yes, it’s wordless. Which means that, though it’s a Latvian film from writer-director Gints Zilbalodis (who pioneered a similar silent storytelling technique with 2019’s “Away”) and co-written by Matiss Kaza, it transcends all language barriers — even as “Flow” will absolutely be a strong contender to repeat the unique feat of 2021’s “Flee” in competing for Oscar nominations in both Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature (it is Latvia’s official submission). And that also means it defies the tropes of “talking animal” movies. This is both a movie that’s a must-see in a theater (this writer gave it an A review out of Cannes and included it in our list of the 15 Best Films at Cannes 2024) and one you could have on a loop at home with your kids endlessly mesmerized and you adults never annoyed.
After Cannes, “Flow” won four prizes at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival: The Audience Award, the Jury Award, a special prize for best original music, and the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution. Then it made its North American premiere as a Centrepiece selection at TIFF. The way Zilbalodis’s “camera” swoops and, yes, flows through his landscapes calls to mind the cinematographic fluidity of, say, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” — films don’t move through environments with quite this level of sophistication that often, even fully built animated environments. It’s not a surprise that Guillermo del Toro, one of the great champions of animation as an art form, as a medium, not a genre, wrote on X: “If I could wish for the future of animation, these images would be its magnificent, breathtaking start.”
Even more remarkable, Zilbalodis, with Rihards Zalupe, also co-composed the score.
All of its many artistic bona fides aside, “Flow” is absolutely a film that will resonate with kids the world over if their parents seek it out for them. In any world that makes sense, “Flow” would be a shoo-in to be the highest-grossing film in Sideshow and Janus Films’ distribution history. Sideshow and Janus have a tiny fraction of the marketing budget that a DreamWorks or Disney-Pixar could apply to position a film like this for a massive audience, but word of mouth could power this one — it certainly deserves to be a box-office success as much as any animated release from one of those major studios.
Sideshow and Janus Films will release “Flow” in New York and Los Angeles theaters November 22, with an expansion wide to follow on December 6.
