Not since Babe: Pig in the City has an animated fable about animals put me through the emotional wringer like this. I swear I'll never stop hearing that cat's plaintive mews. But Flow is a very different beast from Miller's big-budget dark comedy. For one thing, it took Gints Zilbalodis and a small team (usually 3–5 people at a time) over five years to make.
The animation, made in open-source software that the filmmakers were learning as they went along,…