Last night, the fantasy adventure Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. This dialogue-free drama follows a cat, forced to travel far from home in unfamiliar company when an ecological disaster submerges the earth in flood waters.

At the start of the film it appears that the cat lives with a besotted artist who pays tribute to the feline with sculptures of diverse sizes. But even this ailurophile human has abandoned the home, and their pet. As the waters rise and rise, our formerly cosseted hero must learn to survive and make common cause with a ragtag crew comprising a capybara, a secretary bird, a dog and a ring-tailed lemur. Against the odds, the animals have to save themselves from a manmade catastrophe.