by Gill Pringle
Flow is a breath of fresh air. Or, fresh water, in this case.
Directed by Latvian filmmaker, Gints Zilbalodis, Flow premiered at Cannes, before winning numerous awards at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and now a frontrunner for an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, and the official Latvian entry for Best International Film.
Flow takes audiences on a wondrous water-filled journey, through realms natural and mystical, following a courageous cat, capybara, lemur, bird, and dog after their homes are devastated by a great flood.
A singular visionary in the world of animation, Zilbalodis made his feature debut five years ago with award-winning film Away, which he wrote and directed.
With his boundless imagination, Flow is even more ambitious, a thrilling animated spectacle as well as a profound meditation on the fragility of the environment and the spirit of friendship and community.
“I spent five years on this film, so I wanted to sit in a place where I would enjoy being,” Zilbalodis says when we meet in Los Angeles.
“I made my first film completely by myself. Flow is the first experience of actually working with a proper budget and a team. And so, the story, is also about my experience of doing that – learning how to work together with my tiny team in Latvia, Belgium and France.
“I also wanted to make a film without dialogue. In this way, we can express things that can only be done in cinema by telling the story with the camera and lights and also make sure that the animals behave like animals, which I find hasn’t been used as much in animation.
“We’ve seen stories like this from a human point of view, but not really from an animal point of view, and that makes it a lot more emotional. I think we care more about animals sometimes than people,” argues Zilbalodis, 30.
Evocative of a huge tsunami, Flow submerges entire landscapes with water, sweeping away everything in its path.
Huge waves appeared to Zilbalodis while he was preparing his film. “I had some dreams about this big wave coming. I’ve heard other people say that they also had similar dreams about that – or nightmares – but I didn’t want to explain why it’s there.
“It’s somewhat more abstract, and it really started with the character of the cat, and the whole world is built around this journey that I needed to show. I wasn’t interested in showing how the wave started, but I think it’s more interesting that we don’t see people.
“My interpretation is that people were aware of this wave coming, so they just left, and the animals have to take care of themselves. I didn’t want any antagonists, so it’s just the cat versus nature. I wanted each of the animal characters to be very relatable, even though there’s conflict between them and they fight. But the hope is that we understand them,” he says.
Zilbalodis is a cat lover in real life. “I had a cat when I was growing up. I made a short film, actually, when I was in high school about a cat who’s afraid of water – just like this cat.
“Then years later, I decided to revisit this premise, and because I thought I wanted to tell that story about my experience of working in a team, and I thought a cat would be a perfect character to show that kind of very independent, grumpy version of that, so that it goes on this journey and can learn stuff,” he says.
Flow’s hero is not your Disney-esque cute cat. “We looked at a lot of cat and dog videos and went to the zoo and studied animals. I’ve had cats and dogs, so I knew them pretty well. We studied everything and everything is done by hand.
“There’s no motion capture. We didn’t put cats in motion capture suits. Because it’s so complicated with the cat going underwater, for example, I wanted to have these long shots with the camera following the characters to make you feel like you are the cat. It’s great to have that subjective perspective,” he says.
If Flow’s main bird character looks a little like a heron, then he explains that it is in fact a South African Secretarybird.
“I needed a bird which could be very intimidating and authoritative, but it also needed to be able to carry the cat. There weren’t many options except for the Secretarybird.
“With the cats and dogs, we had to be somewhat more precise, because we really know them very well. We recognise if it’s real or not. But with the lemur and the bird, we can push them a little bit further to tell the story, although we still want to make to make sure that they feel like real animals. But again, it’s not a documentary – we’re telling a story,” he explains.
“Because there’s no dialogue, we can show the character development through the decisions that they make. We needed to make sure that they have agency and there’s different stories happening between them and their relationships.
“Since we can’t have them speaking, we had to make sure that each of them has enough time and attention, but they’re also supporting the cat’s journey. The goal is to keep it as simple as possible, which can be really hard.”
A born storyteller, Zilbalodis says, “I started being passionate about cinema at 13 or 14. My dad showed me a lot of classic movies, many Hitchcock and Kubrick films, which I found fascinating. And ever since, I have been watching mostly live action movies, but a lot of animation too. There are so many directors I admire.
“Of course, in animation there’s Miyazaki. I love how unpredictable his films are. I read that when he starts a movie, he doesn’t even know how the story is going to end and finds it during the creative process, which is something I also do. My process is not exactly the same, but the story keeps developing after the script is finished. I start working on the first scene and then find the film while making it. In live action, I like Paul Thomas Anderson’s earlier movies. Alfonso Cuaron is great too, I enjoy how he uses long takes, but all his shots, even the simpler and shorter ones, are very deliberate. Cuaron’s films give the impression that they’re spontaneous and documentary-like. Everything is so carefully designed, even small things in the background. I like this balance in a movie, where it does not feel constructed, although it actually is. It creates a powerful sense of immersion.”
Zilbalodis is proud to be flying the flag on behalf of Latvia. “It’s a really small country with about 1.8 million people but I think we are quite over-represented in terms of animation where almost every year we have a new feature or a bunch of shorts, which gets shown in festivals,” he says.
Produced by Zilbalodis’ independent animation house, Dream Well Studio, Flow is visual storytelling at its best, leaving your imagination to create backstories, rather than being hit over the head with a hammer by the usual tropes of big-budget animation.
