Following the great success of the Latvian animated feature Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024), which brought home the Oscar statues for the first time in the nation’s and the Oscar’s history, this text explores the intuition that the success could relate to a general sensation that viewers might have of being inside a video game. As a researcher focused on the intersection of animation and video games, I suggest that the exploratory narrative of the film based on the premise of a cat lost in a dystopic world without humans seeks to emulate the participatory involvement of a video game player. This idea is considered in relation to the frame, the experiences of discovery, the notion of replayability, and the overall use of gamification.
According to Murray (1998), the success of narratives from digital media like video games lies in the enjoyment of “immersion as a participatory activity” (Murray, 1998: 99). In contrast to the closed narrative of a classic film that depends on use of framing and editing that fragments reality, Flow allows all the framings in the animation to be a permanently moving sequential shot, which makes the viewer feel immersed like in an exploration video game, based on the framing of a third-person shooter and a walking simulator narrative. In the explorational video games, the pursuit of knowledge is a goal in itself that enables gamers to uncover hidden treasures, secret locations and new skills, and this is also the case with the characters in Flow.
Psychological analysis of play shows that the initial phase of immersion in a child’s discovery of the world is similar to the viewpoint of a player in a video game (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2008). With wide-open eyes, the child’s gaze triggers a close inspection of the environment to probe the surrounding space and the rules to control it. This immersive component, characteristic of a child’s viewpoint in an initial phase of psychological development, is shared by video games and the starring of a cat with huge eyes in the animated film. The ability to offer user experiences of discovery and adaptation to unknown worlds (Juul, 2005) is a characteristic that video games share with the animated film.
Another video game feature in Flow is the concept of replayability, which characterizes the ability to go back and find alternative paths that allows learning through repetition in the field of digital games (Bogost et al., 2005). The cat protagonist falls into the water several times, which establishes a repetitive theme in the animated film, but upon returning to the same spot, the cat has learned something new (see figure 1). While the cat the first time almost loses its life when the water reaches its neck as the cat is standing on top of a feline statue, the cat’s subsequent dive the second time is to better observe the seabed and effortless climbs back into the boat. The cat even dives a third time to learn how to fish. As Gint Zilbalodis explains on X, “Flow is as much about the cat’s fear of water as it’s fear of others” (Zilbalodis, 2020).
Classical authors that define play warned about the contradictions between rules and freedom inherent in the study of games known as ludology (Huizinga, 1987, Callois, 2001). Flow navigates a tension between an environment with defined rules of physics and the freedom of movement that allows its creatures to travel by land, sea, and air. This is a world with explicit, though sometimes contradictory, rules: a context without humans whose animals are not anthropomorphic but know how to sail in a boat and how to take the steering wheel to change course.
Finally, there is a widespread trend of gamify our surrounding environments to motivate people to do certain things, such as encouraging a sick person to follow therapy or a user to buy a certain product. Whereas gamification is defined as the use of elements from game design in a context that is not a game (Deterding et al., 2010), maybe the success of Flow to engage the audience in the story also lies in its introduction of gamification strategies enabled by the use of the computer software, the narrative and the immersion capacities of video games in the animated film.
References
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Bogost, I., Mateas, M., Murray, J., and Nitsche, M. (2005). Asking what is possible: The Georgia-Tech approach to Game Research and Education. The International Digital Media & Arts Association Journal, 1(2), 59-68. https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2006.195
Caillois, R. (2001). Man, Play and Games. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., and Nacke, L. (2011). From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification. Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2181037.2181040
Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S. et al. (2008). Understanding videogames. London: Routledge.
Huizinga, J. (2018). Homo Ludens. Madrid: Alianza.
Juul, J. (2005). Half-Real. Videogames between real rules and fictional worlds. Massachussets: MIT Press.
Murray, J. H. (1998). Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Massachussets: MIT Press.
Zilbalodis, G. [@gintszilbalodis]. (2020, February 16) . Flow is as much about the cat’s fear of water as it’s fear of others. [Post]. X. https://x.com/gintszilbalodis/status/1891229277858775122
Maria Pagès holds a PhD in Animation from University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia, specializing in Spanish animation of the 1940s and 1950s, and currently teaches 2D Animation at the Multimedia Image and Technology Center of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, where she is also part of the Digital Culture and Creative Technologies Research Group (DiCode). She has organized two seminars, one in 2016 on Spanish animation pioneers and another in 2017 on Women in animation, as well as participated in several conferences about animation and gender perspective. In 2023, she received a grant to develop a documentary about pioneering Spanish female animator Pepita Pardell funded by the Catalan Institute of Cultural Enterprises, and her book Animation in Spain: Magic Tricks, Drawings on Cels, and CGI (2025) is published with Routledge.