Beating Pixar, Dreamworks and Aardman to the Best Animated Film Oscar with a low-budget film largely created on his laptop is surreal enough, but Flow director Gints Zilbalodis wasn’t prepared for how he would become a hero in his home country.
The Latvian filmmaker told Zavvi: “Because it’s the first time a film from my country has been nominated in any Oscar categories, news from awards season has become front page news in the newspapers, and the Golden Globe statue we got is exhibited at the National Museum of Art, with people queuing round the block to see it. I had no idea it would be like this, and it’s very funny how big of a deal it’s become.
“I’m just happy that it will help the whole industry going forwards, with more opportunities to make films in Latvia, as well as show that there’s as much of an appetite for smaller independent animation as there is for the bigger studio films. I hope more films will be made like this all over the world; it looks different to anything else we’ve seen, and that’s why people have been attracted to it – there's a hunger for something different, from outside the studio system.”
Made using the open-source animation software Blender, alongside a very small team of animators, Flow follows a defiantly independent cat who reluctantly teams up with a ragtag band of animals to navigate apocalyptic floods in a dystopia entirely devoid of human life. As they chart choppy waters, you might find yourself thinking that it’s a modernisation of the Noah’s Ark fable for the climate crisis era, but Zilbalodis stresses that neither inspiration was on his mind during the film’s creation, as he approached the tale as a stripped-down character drama.
He explained: “I don’t think that interpretation should be discarded, as I’m very open to audience’s interpretations and having people see their own experiences through the film and projecting those onto the characters. But my main focus was telling a story about these characters, as I’m not someone who references other works or filmmakers when telling a story, I always start with an emotion and a character – I want to find that personal aspect.
“In this case, it's about a cat who starts out being very independent and then learns to trust others, which represented my own journey making this film, as I had worked on my own up until this point and I had to learn how to trust others. After finding that personal aspect, bigger picture ideas such as climate change organically emerge within the story, but I don’t want to force them; if I start with a message rather than a character, it becomes too direct, and I’d rather make sure that it’s interwoven into the story.”
Zilbalodis began production on Flow all the way back in 2019, with his 2012 short film Aqua – about a cat afraid of water – forming the basis for the story. He knew he wanted to expand on that short, but it took several years and even more experiments with the narrative to find the feature-length tale he wanted to tell.
“That short was just about a cat with a fear of water, there isn’t an ensemble of characters; in the feature, we have that ensemble, and the story naturally became about his fear of others. While developing the movie, what the story would become kept evolving, we wrote many drafts of the script and experimented with going in various directions, but it always kept that strong concept at its core.
“Having the earlier short made it easier for me to make this, as there was a lot of pressure on this being my first film with a team and with a budget, but I could look back and have proof that this story worked in its most distilled form. However, my shorts, and the short-form storytelling I really like, are all about small, specific moments, and the stories I wanted to tell began having bigger arcs.
“In a feature, I really want to develop the characters by having moments where it might look like nothing is happening. Plot isn’t being pushed forward, but through moments of silence, you can have moments of character development you couldn’t afford in a short film.”
The lack of human characters means there is no spoken dialogue in the film, but the director objects to it being called a silent film. For starters, he co-composed the original score, which he initially created more than seven hours of music for.
“I always get asked if it’s a challenge to tell a story without dialogue, but using it would be a greater challenge to me because I’m more visually minded”, he continued. “I remember emotions and images from films more than lines of dialogue, and I also think not featuring spoken conversations forces me to come up with original ways of telling a story, that are more affecting than having two people standing and explaining things.
“I like having the limitations of just light and music to express your ideas, especially in animation, as there are an infinite number of choices you can make, and when you’re working with a narrative framework it makes it easier to get those going. My favourite films are driven purely by visuals, which makes them feel more cinematic – there's a universal appeal that doesn’t need to be translated.
“This isn’t a silent film, it’s a dialogue free film; there is a language, both in the character voices and the language of filmmaking, in images and sounds. That’s how cinema started, and that’s how any language began - before we spoke as humans, we expressed ourselves through gestures and visual means, and that’s a language in itself.”
With the success of Flow, Zilbalodis hopes Hollywood studios take note and begin funding riskier animated projects with budgets as low as his; compare his €3.5 million to the estimated $78 million of The Wild Robot and $200 million of Pixar’s Inside Out 2. Making $20 million worldwide and counting shows a healthy return on the modest investment, with only a small portion of that box office accounting for the haul in Latvia, where this became the biggest box office hit of all time.
The film’s cultural impact will continue to be seen next month, when a statue of the cat will be erected outside the Town Hall in capital city Riga, although the director wants his personal legacy to be inspiring other animators to creature feature films using nothing more than the same open-source software he used. He’s optimistic that we're about to see a revolution in animation, with tech innovations ensuring budding filmmakers anywhere in the world can create Oscar-worthy narratives from their bedrooms.
The flipside of this, however, is the lingering anxiety that a democratisation of the animation process opens the doors for creators to generate features entirely with AI.
“That’s something that worries me. I’ve realised that it’s inevitable that we’ll see AI used to generate entire animated features as it’s now hard to put the genie back in the lamp, but I know it’s not something I’d want to watch, and I’m optimistic that audiences would feel the same.
“Even if it looks nice, there would still be the same problems with the AI we see now that doesn’t look great. You can’t make anything emotional or personal with a work that’s entirely generated, and even if people are just incorporating some AI tools in production, I’m not interested in using those – I enjoy the animation process and I love making things my own way, and I don’t want to give that over to some software.
“I think people will still prefer to see handmade things with human imperfections, but at the same time, this generated stuff is unavoidable. This new world is scary, and I don’t know what we can do as animators to stop that.”
Luckily, Zilbalodis will keep making films, ensuring that you will only ever see human fingerprints in his CGI designs. Throughout awards season, he’s been spending time in-between ceremonies, festivals and endless interviews working on his next feature, which like Flow, is being created on the very laptop he used to speak to me over Zoom.
“It’s very different from Flow, as I don’t want to be a filmmaker who makes the same movie twice; I want to keep doing things that challenge me and take on projects that I’m afraid of. It’s bigger in scale, because after the success of this film, we have opportunities to grow.
“However, I’ve heard countless stories of independent filmmakers being offered a huge project after a small success, and it can be overwhelming to make that sudden leap. I want to gradually move up to that scale, learning how to work with bigger teams along the way so I can keep growing as a director.
“The biggest change next time is that it’s the first film I've made with spoken dialogue – it's a new challenge, but I’m very excited about taking it on.”
Flow is released in UK cinemas on Friday, 22nd March.
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