Gints Zilbalodis’s Latvian film Flow —- which won the Oscar for best animated film some hours back at the 97th Academy Awards — manages to hold your attention through its 85-minute runtime without a single dialogue.

The film begins with a lone black cat that climbs a giant statue when the city it lives in gets submerged in flood water. Stuck on the statue, the cat watches as buildings and trees get swept away, and then makes a journey on a boat across the waterlogged landscape.

As the boat drifts past the remnants of civilisation — crumbling structures, decaying ships, and forgotten objects — the cat is befriended by other animals: a capybara, a Labrador, a secretary bird, and a lemur. Together, they form an unlikely group, learning to survive in the perilous and ever-changing waters. There’s no dialogue, no explicit backstory; just movement, expression, and the ebb and flow of their fragile co-existence.

Flow has a dreamlike quality. The way the camera moves, often gliding across the water or following the cat from behind, makes you feel like you're right there. The animals have been animated with great attention to realism. In the absence of words, their gestures speak volumes — the cat arches its back in hesitation, the dog wags its tail in excitement and the capybara barely reacts to anything, so resigned it is to the chaos around.

The relationships between the animals evolve in small but significant ways. At first, they’re wary of each other, each used to fending for themselves. But as they face dangers together — storms, predators, the ever-present threat of the unknown — they begin to trust one another. There are moments of quiet solitude where the only sound is the lapping of water or the distant calls of unseen creatures.

Flow is also an environmental parable but it never feels preachy. The absence of humans in this world feels eerily significant. The flooded cities, the abandoned boats, the remnants of a habitation — it’s hard not to see it as a reflection of our own potential future.

Yet, despite the underlying sense of loss, Flow isn’t bleak. By the time the film reaches its final moments, there’s a sense of completion as well as of continuity. The last scene heralds a new beginning for the animals. It’s a reminder that life moves on, that adaptation is survival, and that sometimes the best one can do is stay afloat.