A river runs through it: "Flow"

The Latvian Gints Zilbalodis announced himself as a major new player in global animation with the surreal, wordless imagery of 2019's Away, to all intents and purposes a one-man job. His follow-up Flow reaches for greater scale and heft - familiar production bodies are listed in the opening credits, as is a director of animation who isn't Zilbalodis himself - and perhaps for a dash more mass appeal in its centring of a wide-eyed feline, living on what appears to be some sort of Cat Island and navigating rapidly rising water levels. So far, this expansion plan has proved a success: at both this year's Golden Globes and Oscars, Flow beat out Pixar's Inside Out 2, DreamWorks' The Wild Robot and the new Wallace & Gromit to win the Best Animated Feature prize. Even so, Zilbalodis continues to operate some way from the animated norm, rejecting the recognisably Disneyish for other influences (and, indeed, the otherworldly). More so than even the immersive Away, Flow owes some debt to many long hours of gaming; it's clearly been raised on folktales, in its preference for parables and suggestive metaphor over frenetic motion; and it often recalls Ghibli, not just in its backdrops and messaging, but in its frequent pauses for reflection. (As with the image Zilbalodis opens with and returns to time and again: that of our black tabby hero peering into a swelling mass of water.) It's open, in other words, to other approaches. Take, for example, the dogs our furry adventurer encounters on his travels, which initially strike the eye as ugly for avatars in a commercially released animation: blockily pixellated, bluntly unfinessed, they recall turn-of-the-millennium screensavers, or the dancing baby in Ally McBeal. They are also, demonstrably, a deliberate choice. In this landscape, cats are naturally more than a little nervous about the rising tides. These dogs, on the other hand, bound on blithely, running with the pack, confident it's only a drop of rain. You wouldn't have to take too great a leap to map these reactions onto humankind's responses to the climate crisis.

So there's a message - and we should, as ever, heed Sam Goldwyn's apocryphal zinger about messages in movies - but you could equally allow yourself just to be swept away by the strange, beguiling (yes) flow of the images that message is carried within. There's something both very striking and seductive about the way Zilbalodis's camera (or line of approach, if camera is too concrete a term for animation) floats; it changes not just our understanding of this environment, but our sense of how we move around it, and actually brings the viewer closer to how we dream (and sometimes - as when we see the tiny cat adrift in an ever more vast lake - to how we submit to nightmare). The dreaminess is heightened by the fact Flow plays out in as close to silence as our movies are now allowed to get, with only the odd evocative sound effect for echolocation. Somewhere in the Zilbalodis method is a rejection of the anchoring sureties of so much commercial animation: gone is the photorealistic design, the camera tethered to a human POV, the characters intended to look, sound and behave like us for the most part. He's not yet gone full Švankmajer, but Zilbalodis doesn't want to mollycoddle or pacify us; he's okay with the viewer being discombobulated, unsettled or stressed, not least because it fits with what he's saying. Even so, Flow drifts into more abstract territory than Away, which gave us a boy with human features to latch onto. Weirdly, the film shares with autumnal megahit The Wild Robot a near-total absence of bipedal life, but leans more heavily into the implication we may have long since gone under as a species. 84 minutes remains a long time for a film to have to sustain itself without obvious human interest; and if you're neither much of an animal person nor an animation nut, there are stretches here that will resemble a game on autoplay mode, very pretty but not as involving as they might be. As a vision of the future, Flow is also by definition grim. (Inside Out 2 retains the advantage when it comes to human behaviour. And gags.) Like his tabby protagonist, attempting to paw out what remains of his sodden kingdom, Zilbalodis is walking the boundaries of his artform, seeing how far he can go in any one direction while still taking an audience with him. Some have followed enthusiastically, others still have cheered; if I hung back and dragged my feet a little here, the animator's endeavour remains admirable all the same. There aren't many attempting something so conspicuously different in this most crowded of fields.

Flow opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.