Directed by Gints Zilbalodis

In cinemas now

A cat struggles to survive a cataclysmic flood.

I knew that a Latvian movie had pipped the Hollywood behemoths to the Academy Award for Best Animation Feature this year, but beyond that I had was entirely ignorant of what I was about to see.

Our hero is a charcoal coloured cat, brave and smart, but enjoying a lazy life somewhere in a verdant forest, up the hill from the lush pasture on the banks of an equally lazy river, abundant with brightly coloured fish. Cat’s biggest worry in life are some bothersome but not very clever dogs, although one of the canines, an eager-to-please Labrador, seems to have adopted Cat as its master.

Then the flood comes in the form of a terrifying wall of water, consuming all before it. Whether this catastrophe is man-made or natural is never explained, and nor is that important, although the humans have all vanished a long time before and Cat (and Labrador) are left to fend for themselves, amid the submerged trees, mountains and deserted palaces. Along the way they pick up a collection of other animal companions – a sleepy capybara; a vain, possessive ring-tailed lemur; and an authoritarian secretary bird – as they negotiate the rising waters in a drifting, paint-peeled felucca.

This multi-continental menagerie tells us we are in a world of allegory and the fantastical, demanding that, should civilisation be destroyed, we must create new civilisations founded on friendship, co-operation and empathy if we are to have any chance of survival. It also suggests that even our frailties will be our greatest strengths if we tolerate others and allow our individualities to complement the individualities of others. If that sounds trite, then, perhaps it is, but at this horrible moment in history, it’s just what the existential doom-doctor ordered.

Entirely without dialogue, constructed as a series of long, spectacular travelling shots, this is a visually sumptuous production that puts the audience at the heart of the animal action, our POV constantly at cat-level, rendering us as vulnerable and keen to survive as our feline hero. The story is abstract and dreamlike at times, but it is never boring, always absorbing and intriguing, but not without delicious moments of superbly observed animal humour.

Verdict: If you want nuts and bolts, gags per minute, family therapy, Pixar-style storytelling, then you will be disappointed, but if you are prepared to (literally) go with the Flow then this is an entirely life-affirming 84 minutes of animated gorgeousness. 9/10

 Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com