Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. “Flow” opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, November 22.

There’s a moment near the end of Latvian animation director Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow” that powerfully tugs at the heartstrings. It’s when the film’s central character, a black cat who you’ve come to have a profound emotional connection with, rediscovers a lost ball that he and his animal friends (especially a lemur) had been playing with earlier in the movie. He thought he’d never see it again. And suddenly he does.

Sometimes, lost things can be found again.

If you thought that emotion elicited without cloying manipulation was something lost in animation, it is found again in “Flow” as well. A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too.