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Paper short abstract

This paper interprets Gints Zilbalodis’s award-winning animated film Flow (2024) as a wordless fairy-tale film built around ecological collapse, nonhuman kinship and the ethics of survival in a fluid story-world.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers an ecocritical interpretation of Flow (2024), Gints Zilbalodis’s award-winning animated film, reading it as a wordless fairy-tale film built around ecological collapse, nonhuman kinship and the ethics of survival in a fluid story-world. Set in a flooded landscape, Flow displaces human centrality by foregrounding the journey of a solitary cat who traverses a deluged terrain in uneasy alliance with other animals. The film’s absence of human language, reliance on visual storytelling and emphasis on fluid motion align it with affective ecologies: every ripple in the water, every pause in the cat’s movement and every shift in the soundscape activate a sense of wonder. The film centres water as a narrative force and medium of ethical reorientation, evoking ecological themes of fluid entanglement, vulnerability and relational ethics. This aesthetic and affective dimension echoes the logic of fairy tales, where nature and nonhuman characters become agents of reciprocal transformation. In Flow, familiar fairy-tale motifs – the reluctant hero, the quest for survival, the unexpected helper, the enchanted landscape – are entangled within a world altered by climate catastrophe. This ecocritical fairy-tale film challenges essentialist visions of nature by presenting fluid ecologies in which beings and elements are co-constitutive and interdependent. This paper situates Flow within an emerging lineage of wonder media that reimagine contemporary ecological anxieties through fairy-tale frameworks.