Metacritic reviews

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.

Flow is a joy to experience but also a deeply affecting story, the work of a unique talent who deserves to be ranked among the world’s great animation artists.

There are no human characters in Flow and no dialogue beyond barks and squawks but the sense of peril is compelling, the visuals are impressive and the emotional spell it casts is captivating.

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. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.

Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.

For many of us staring down the next four years, the idea that a community can come together to take on the rising tides couldn’t be more welcome or needed.

As a virtuoso experiment, the freedom provided by animation maybe lets the camera “flow” a little too much. The film’s choice to integrate rather pretty 3D animation with more cartoonish designs produces mixed results for pure aesthetic pleasure, and in a brief 84-minute runtime it still manages to be a little repetitive.

Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature is movingly attuned to its characters’ primal instincts.

The trouble with Flow is that it already looks dated — commendable to be sure, yet rudimentary at the same time. It’s as if Zilbalodis decided to dump an ocean’s worth of water in the Uncanny Valley. Still, animal-loving viewers will bond almost instantly with the cat and its motley companions.

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.