Immersive Oscar-winning animation Flow offers an amusing cat's-eye view of the world

In recent years, ever since the Lumière brothers turned their cameras on workers leaving a factory, a great innovation has emerged in the realm of cinema: the cat cam. This device, which attaches a miniature camera to the collar of our feline friends, has become a staple of the online world, offering us an unprecedented window into the territorial disputes, food heists, and curious meows of the cat kingdom.

If cat cams allow us a glimpse of pure, animistic cinema, then the recent Oscar-winning Latvian animated feature, "Flow," may be the next best thing. This imaginative adventure gleefully dispenses with any human presence or anthropomorphic talking animals, starring only animals and voiced by their real-life counterparts.

The film has even captured the attention of animal audiences themselves, with numerous social media videos showing house pets captivated by the on-screen action. Is their apparent wonder and anxiety genuine, or are they merely reacting to the chattering of their own kind? We can never truly know their thoughts, of course, but these cats and dogs are undeniably mesmerized.

Cats are sure to be drawn to the film's purring protagonist, an unnamed, resilient feline with dark, matte-gray fur and headlight-like amber eyes, like a distant cousin of Jiji, the black cat from Miyazaki's "Kiki's Delivery Service." We first see it curiously eyeing its own reflection in a river deep in the jungle.

It's a world seen through the eyes of a cat, one in which humans have disappeared or been wiped out for reasons unknown, though the rising tides suggest some kind of self-inflicted ecological disaster. In a country home surrounded by wooden animal carvings, the cat sleeps in its late owner's empty bed, pawing at a mattress that still holds the memory of another life. A mournful sigh soon gives way to a yawn, then a nap. The world keeps turning.

The cat is swept away by a flash flood and takes refuge on an old sailboat, which soon becomes a miniature Noah's Ark, crammed with refugees: a sleepy capybara (voiced, controversially, by a baby camel), a flustered ring-tailed lemur, a stately secretary bird, and an upbeat Labrador retriever. They bicker and scurry, they learn to survive as a makeshift family. All the while, their boat sails through the ruins of ancient civilizations, magnificent and futile, long since abandoned to nature.

Director Gints Zilbalodis has said that he was partly inspired by the work of French filmmaker Jacques Tati, whose gift for silent, physical comedy is evident throughout "Flow's" charming humor. With an exhilarating sense of space, Zilbalodis's roving virtual camera captures images that are both poetic and unexpectedly absurd: a cat suspended underwater, surrounded by rainbow-colored fish, as if floating in deep space; a troop of lemurs wearing junkyard crowns, drifting downriver on a leaky barge like lost tourists.

At one point, a prehistoric whale — seen from atop a towering cat idol — breaches the surface of the rising floodwaters, crosses the horizon, and then plunges back into the depths. It's a beautiful image, full of power and myth, ancient secrets and modern warnings.

While the world of "Flow" — made using Blender, a free online 3D software — is rendered in painterly detail, the animal protagonists have a simple, almost wireframe quality, not unlike the graphics of an early Playstation. This proves to be a wise decision: the rudimentary designs, combined with real-world sounds, make them more expressive than Hollywood's increasingly dominant photorealistic creations.

In many ways, it's the antithesis of the big-studio animation model, which has been in a state of creative decline for at least the past decade, and that's putting it mildly. It's hard to remember the last time Disney, DreamWorks, or Pixar came anywhere close to the sense of wonder or imagination of "Flow" — arguably, you'd have to go back to the first half of Pixar's 2008 film, "WALL-E," itself an extended, Tati-esque sequence with no verbal dialogue or human characters.

Unsurprisingly, then, the unity of "Flow's" vision is compromised only when conventional animation tropes creep in around the edges — when the animals occasionally exhibit human-like tendencies or emotions, or when a whiff of paradisiacal imagery threatens to betray its fundamentally animistic tone. Still, not even the allegorical, near-sentimental ending can diminish the beauty of "Flow"; this isn't a movie about making statements or lamenting past mistakes, though it carries a faint air of melancholy.

As its Zen-like title suggests, it's about acceptance — (wisely looking around) — the oneness of all creatures, and the fact that change is merely a cycle of the universe. As Jeff Goldblum reminds us, life finds a way — with or without humans. "Flow" is currently playing in theaters.