Reader Debra says “Farbsy is a comedian on Instagram who pretends to run a customer service line for cats.” That is, the animals call in to beef.

Click the picture or here to see the video on Instagram, and sound up:

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There’s a new cat movie called “Flow”, made in Latvia, which gets an unheard-of rating for both critics and audience on Rotten Tomatoes:

And the NYT review, archived here, is also excellent, especially if you’re an ailurophile:

“Flow,” an animated adventure film with a touch of magical realism, is a welcome entrant in the cat-movie canon, exuding a profound affection for our four-legged friends.

Its hero, a plucky black cat with round, expressive eyes, doesn’t speak a word of dialogue, and acts more or less like a domestic house cat, but under the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s doting gaze, he’s as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for. Purring, scratching and scrabbling up walls, this cat virtually leaps off the screen.

“Flow,” written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, concerns the cat’s survival during a flood of almost biblical proportions. The story, simple but compelling, unfolds as a kind of feline picaresque, as he clambers aboard a passing sailboat that drifts from one scenic exploit to another. He soon encounters other stranded animals, including a guileless Labrador retriever and a benevolent secretary bird, who tag along to form what eventually resembles a charming, ragtag menagerie. Their adventures together range from hair raising, as when a thunderstorm threatens to capsize their ship, to endearingly mundane, like when a rotund capybara helps a lemur gather a collection of knickknacks.

It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.

The trailer:

The film also has a Wikipedia entry (it also summarizes the plot, which you may want to avoid before you see it), and it details the movie’s encomiums:

Flow (Latvian: Straume) is a 2024 animated fantasy adventure film directed by Gints Zilbalodis and written by Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža. The film is notable for containing no dialogue.

Upon premiering at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the film received critical acclaim and won numerous film and animation awards, including the Best Animated Film awards at the European Film Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and the National Board of Review Awards. The film was selected as the Latvian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.

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And here’s a five-minute video compilation of cats in the snow:

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h/t: Laura, Jez