This animated film winning multiple awards should be reason enough to get it added to my watchlist but there’s also the fact that it was made using Blender. It’s a relatively short film but it still took the team more than five years to make it. With beautiful visuals, pleasant music and no dialogue, this sure is an easy film to watch and who could dislike its animal characters? It’s nice enough but there’s no plot, no world building and not much meaning at all. As its title suggests, it’s just one scene flowing into another with no direction so I’m not that impressed.

A cat wandering in a forest by itself finds itself chased by a pack of dogs. They are interrupted by deer stampeding to escape rising waters. The cats retreats to a house filled with cat sculptures and drawings that it seemingly lives in but is empty of humans. Yet the water level continues to rise. The dogs get on a boat and the cat is stuck at the top of a giant cat statue. Then a sailboat with a capybara on board passes by and the cat manages to climb onto it. The next day, the sailboat has drifted into a forest that is being submerged by the ever rising flood. A hostile secretarybird causes the cat to fall overboard but it is saved by a massive whale and later a friendly secretarybird who returns it to the sailboat. The capybara invites aboard a lemur who a collection human-made objects in a basket. When the sailboat stops at a piece of land that is still above the water, the cat gets off to explore. A happy Labrador Retriever from the pack of dogs earlier joins them. The hostile secretarybird once again attacks the cat only to be opposed by the friendly one. In the tussle, the latter’s wing is injured and so it joins the impromptu crew on the sailboard just before it sets off once more.

The painterly art style is both gorgeous and gives it a unique look. As they used Blender’s real-time renderer EEVEE, it doesn’t have the perfectly crisp look of other animated films and that is to its advantage. Instead of being anthropomorphic, the animals are mostly anatomically correct and are incapable of speech. I like the idea of this being at least semi-realistic but even a few minutes of watching it is enough to notice how far this depiction is from realistic animal behavior. A cat fleeing from a pack of dogs would immediately head for the nearest tree, not try to outsprint them. Later on, they outright abandon any pretense at realism in having the animals being able to steer the sailboat. I’m also frustrated in that while this looks like a crew of animals going on a journey, that isn’t actually the case as they have no destination in mind. It’s just a series of encounters that they try to survive while familiar objects and other animals recur through improbable coincidence. The team notes that the film was made without a storyboard and instead just had the animals react naturally to their surroundings. That makes it a sensory phantasmagoria that might be engrossing but also without any larger purpose.

I’d have preferred a film that depicted more realistic animal behavior using this art style but I suppose that wouldn’t have made for a fantastic enough spectacle. Failing that, I would loved it if they’d set it in a properly developed world with some kind of consistent backstory. They tease an intriguing world which clearly was once inhabited by humans yet they are now gone. There are impossibly tall towers, strange statues and seemingly magical elements. Unfortunately just as the animals find all this incomprehensible, we the audience are not given any explanations about the story of this world. The creators never bothered to do any real world building and so we’re meant to accept all this at face value, marveling at the wondrous sights but never asking about the underlying logic. There are clearly many fans of this approach but this is extremely unsatisfying to me.

So to me this is nice to look at and like everyone else I like the semi-realistic animals. But it’s also a very insubstantial work that sometimes feels more like a tech demo than a film that is trying to say something. I’d say it’s technically ambitious but artistically uninteresting and so I’d say that it’s been overrated by critics who just love a cute cat.