Anyone mourning the poignant, meaningful feeling from Team Ico needs to check out Flow, the Oscar-winning film that beat Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot

When I was ushered into a private screening of Flow, the animated Latvian adventure film created entirely in the free and open-source software, Blender, I was not expecting to come out of the cinema thinking of nothing but Team Ico and Fumito Ueda. I went into the film completely blind: all that I knew was that Flow had won an Oscar for best animated feature (pipping both The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2 to the post), and was completely dialogue-free.

Aside from a slightly rustic art direction that reminds me of something between a PS2 and PS3 game thanks to Blender’s utilitarian style, there’s just something about Flow that screams Team Ico. Maybe it’s in the emotive, bold storytelling that manages to convey more emotion than even the most verbose films, maybe it’s in the towering architecture and fantasy-meets-reality nature of the setting. But, either way, the film feels like it could be a companion to Ueda’s oeuvre – a cross-media homage to one of game development’s greats.

The story follows the journey of an expressive, often mischievous cat who is searching for safety and stability after its home is devastated by a flood. Though there is evidence of human life in the world, mankind is absent from the plot – only thumbprints of man’s legacy on the world are left behind. Instead, our cast is comprised of a pack of dogs, a reticent capybara, a ring-tailed lemur, and winged creatures with unclear motives.

Behind the anthropomorphic drama, there’s a very clear message: community will help you survive. Maybe the film is about dismantling tribalism and finding safety and common ground with people outside your bubble, maybe it’s about how the only way we can survive on a doomed planet is by putting aside our differences and working together to build a better world. Maybe it’s simply about a cat that doesn’t like water, and the ancient blood feud between canines and felines. Who knows?

Either way, the wordlessness of Flow is part of its charm. Clocking in at 84 minutes, the film earns (nearly) every second of its on-screen time, and never feels like a drag – pretty impressive given that there is not one line of dialogue in the whole thing. Most of the communication is done through big, expressive eyes, easily-interpreted animal body language, and languid, reflective shots of the waterlogged world. The film took five and a half years to produce (another unconscious link to Ueda and Team Ico’s famously long gestation period, perhaps), and was figured out entirely without storyboards.

Director Gints Zilbalodis and writer Matīss Kaža instead opted to place the 3D models of the animals in the work-in-progress environments within Blender, and “explore them with the camera”. This is a pretty experimental process for an animated feature, and – to my eye – reads more like a game development technique than a film-making one.

The result is emotive, raw, and intuitive. Our floating camera seems to flit between esteemed filmic cinematography, and adept video game ‘floating eye’. Our lens moves with confidence and precision as it banks, pans, and sweeps across oceanic horizons, entangled ruins choked with vines, and small atolls free from the suffocating, exponentially rising water.

I can’t find any evidence of either Zilbalodis or Kaža saying they’ve played any Team Ico games (and I wasn’t able to secure an interview), but to me, it seems so clear that Ueda’s influence is all over Flow. Whether it’s the visual language, the mature themes, the innovative use of animation, the innate understanding of animal psychology, or the grounded surrealism that permeates every pore of Flow, it feels like Japan Studio’s spirit lives on in this curious, exceptional film. I wasn’t the only person saying this, either; when I left the screening (exclusively for games industry folks, granted), I heard almost every cluster of people mentioning Team Ico. A cursory Google will turn up Reddit threads linking Flow and Ueda. The link is clear for anyone with the eyes to see it.

“We are all in the same boat and must overcome our differences to find ways to work together,” Zilbalodis emoted at the Oscars when he picked up his award. I feel like that hits upon something at the core of Flow’s soul – a message of unity in a world being drowned by negativity, fear, rage, disconnection.

So, TL;DR? There’s a reason Flow won an Oscar, folks. And anyone that has even a passing interest in video games should check it out. After all, a rising tide lifts all ships, right?

Flow appears in UK cinemas from March 21, 2025, and is distributed by Curzon.