Part of the beauty of Flow, a Latvian film that won this year's Oscar for best animated feature, is its simplicity. In an age of overstuffed blockbusters, this is a straightforward tale. There's a flood. A black cat fights to survive it. It encounters other animals trying to do the same. An unlikely band of brothers pulls together to overcome peril.
These are not Disneyfied anthropomorphic creatures. They have subtle personalities, as real animals do, but don't speak or sing. Instead, they meow, grunt, bark, and cawcaw at one another (and the film's sound design is superb).
The simple story and lack of dialogue create space for the other thing that makes Flow so beautiful: its gorgeous animation. As the flood sweeps our heroes' rickety raft through scenery that's both recognizably human and fantastically surreal (the exact setting remains as mysterious as the flood's cause), director Gints Zilbalodis delivers a series of mesmerizing long takes that capture the wonder and terror of the animals' adventure through a strange world.
Even more remarkable is that all of it was rendered using Blender, a free and open-source 3D graphic engine. With less than $4 million and some free software, Zilbalodis crafted a story more moving and artistically impressive than most movies with budgets 100 times as large.
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