I watched this on the 26th of April, 2025, in Curzon.
What a wonderful film! It’s animated, about a cat in a post-human rewilded world (think Babylonian buildings strangled with vines, Scandanavian houses littered with moss and pencil sketchings, and wooden dinghies) which is flooded, and the other animals with whom it survives until the waters drain.
Firstly, utterly gorgeous animation, in an almost Ghibli-esque (or BoTW-esque) combination of lavishly detailed backgrounds, and clean, stylised characters.
The sound design was phenomenal too, animal chirpings, warblings and snuffles, birds crying, and water you could feel spraying on your face.
Speaking of, the water animation? I mean yeah yeah Avatar 2 but I had no idea it could be made so realistic, so translucently icy in Blender, of all tools.
The plot itself; it’s presented through the eyes of the cat, and while of course some things are necessarily comprehensible to us but not to the cat, but the film did its best to maintain parity in that regard, and we feel every bit of wonder and confusion and small-scale dread that the cat does.
And finally, something particularly unique to the film was its resistance to anthropomorphising the animals: they were recognisably inhuman. Sometimes you could see a little flash of humanity, but it was hard to tell whether that was projection or just inherent to the animals (speaking as a city guy), and the rest of the time it was almost like watching a documentary, in their lovingly rendered gestures, poses, chirrups, and glances.
A deserved Oscar.