‘Flow,’ An Edge-Of-Your-Seat Survival Film, Gets U.S. Trailer, Release Date

In a standout year for animated features, one of the very best titles of the year, Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow, has secured a U.S. release date and a new trailer from American distributors Sideshow and Janus Films.

Watch the new trailer below:

The film is set to open in Los Angeles and New York on November 22, followed by a nationwide U.S. release on December 6, 2024.

I saw Flow last week at the Ottawa Int’l Animation Festival, where it won the feature film grand prize. The story is easy to explain: a cat, a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog have to survive and find dry land in a newly-aquatic planet Earth. With the water constantly rising, it’s an edge-of-your-seat survival film that had the entire audience I saw it with spellbound for its entire 85-minute running time, which goes by in the blink of an eye.

While the dialogue-less film may be easy to describe, it’s infinitely complex in emotion and meaning. It’s an example of cinema at its finest and one of the best animated features I’ve seen in years. The film, a very strong contender for the best animated feature Academy Award, has already been submitted by Latvia as the country’s official entry for the international feature film Oscar.

It’s the second feature directed by Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis, who turns 30 years old this year. He produced his first feature Away (2019) entirely by himself. Flow, loosely inspired by his 2012 student film Aqua, is a more ambitious $3.7 million co-production between France/Belgium co-production, with most of the animation done at Sacrebleu Productions (France), Take Five (Belgium), and Zilbalodis’s own company in Latvia, Dream Well Studio.

Zilbalodis is the film’s director, art director, cinematographer, and editor. Additionally, he co-wrote the film with Matīss Kaža. Both of them also produced the film with Ron Dyens and Gregory Zalcman.

Léo Silly-Pélissier was director of animation, and Zilbalodis composed the music with Rihards Zaļupe. Gurwal Coïc-Gallas was sound designer.

The film was animated with free open-source software Blender and its real-time rendering engine Eevee.