5 Children’s Movies to Stream Now

‘Flow’

Stream it on Max.

During his acceptance speech at the Oscars on Sunday, the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis (“Away”) spoke about overcoming our differences, a central theme of his movie and a lesson that feels more urgent today than ever. “Flow,” which won best animated feature film, is the dreamy tale of a black cat with huge, expressive yellow eyes. After getting caught in a sudden and enormous flood, the cat finds an old sailboat and then meets a capybara, a benevolent Labrador retriever, a secretary bird and a lemur along the way. The unlikely crew must learn to accept one another and work together to survive in their strange, beautiful, post-flood world.

There’s zero dialogue in this film, which might pose a challenge for children who are used to movies with rapid-fire chatter like “Sonic the Hedgehog,” but the animals here are so expressive, distinct and endearing, it’s easy to get swept up into the story. Even my son, a fierce dog lover who “hates cats,” gave it a go. Zilbalodis wrote the script with Matiss Kaza.

‘Plankton: The Movie’

Stream it on Netflix.

This is the latest in a string of animated musical features starring different characters from Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants” universe, created by Stephen Hillenburg. Our hero (well, antihero) this go-round is Plankton (voiced by Mr. Lawrence), a little green one-eyed baddie intent on taking over Bikini Bottom and then the world. When Plankton’s wife, Karen (Jill Talley), gets angry at him, she transforms into a rage-filled hydra-headed computer who has her own plan for world domination.

The plot is downright wacky, which makes sense given that this is based on a show about a yellow sponge who wears shorts and a necktie. Along the way, SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) occasionally transforms into a Freudian psychologist who analyzes Plankton to figure out what the heck is wrong with him. In the end, Plankton learns a little bit about empathy.