Flow Director Gints Zilbalodis on Silent Animation, Water [Interview]

Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow” (Sideshow and Janus) might be the animated surprise of the year. Co-written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, it’s a sublime adventure about a black cat trying to survive a massive flood, immersing the viewer in the action without dialogue but with a roving, 360-degree camera. It’s like Hayao Miyazaki meets Alfonso Cuarón in its cinematic daring. After earning the top prizes at the Animation Is Film and Ottawa International Animation festivals, the Latvian entry for the Best International Feature Oscar also vies for Best Animated Feature.

It all started with the director’s 2012 student short “Aqua,” about a cat overcoming its fear of water in the ocean. This inspired “Flow” (his second feature following “Away”), which greatly expands the story so that now it’s a black cat confronting its fear of water and other animals by escaping a flood in a boat with a capybara, lemur, stork, and golden retriever.

“I’ve never had dialogue in any of the films I’ve made, so I think of stories where it makes sense,” Zilbalodis told IndieWire. “And in this case, it’s all animals behaving like animals because I feel more comfortable telling stories like this. Also, I’m a visually minded person, and I can be more expressive with all the other tools. Without dialogue, I have to invent in more unique ways. It allows me to be more cinematic, and I can use the camera more as a storytelling tool. And I think in animation, especially, even though my goal is to keep it as grounded as possible, I can stay close to the characters and be more expressionistic with the camera.”

Zilbalodis began “Flow” in 2019 with a small team spread between his studio in Latvia (Dream Well Studio) and others in France (Sacrebleu) and Belgium (Take Five), where the principal animation was done. They used the open-source Blender software with its real-time renderer, which provides a video game-like quality, only slightly more refined. He wanted the characters to look more stylized and the backgrounds more detailed.

“We wanted to create that immersive feeling where you can sense all these different textures and the elements in the film: the water and the wind,” he said. “But I didn’t want complete realism, I still wanted it to feel kind of like It’s handmade in some way, or have these imperfections and kind of brushstrokes, and the colors are somewhat pushed or impressionistic somewhat.”

It was all about the camera following the cat on its perilous journey through the exquisite environments, allowing us to fill in the blanks by giving an impression of detail. “You fill it with your own experiences,” Zilbalodis added. “Many people have told me that it looks exactly like their cat. I think by abstracting it, you’re making it look more timeless.”

“Flow” opens with an image of a skinny cat with amber eyes looking at itself in a reflection in a puddle. The feline finds itself in a forest surrounded by large cat sculptures, but there is no sign of human life. Later, after snatching a fish from five distracted dogs, the cat runs for its life before the flood comes, and it flees with a herd of animals, eventually finding refuge on the boat together.

“We’re immediately thrown in this world and experiencing it in a very grounded way,” said Zilbalodis. “Almost like it’s shot like a documentary at first with this handheld camera. There are a lot of chases, and the way that we’re showing it is with these long takes where the camera is just following them, and there’s not a lot of editing, just movements within the frame.

“And it is significant that the cat is literally reflecting upon itself in this moment, and it’s looking at water,” he continued. “And it was all in the script that the water is also kind of disrupted. There’s this anxiety in the water. It’s trembling to kind of show how the cat is also experiencing these emotions. It took a long time to develop the physics of the water, and the interaction with the animals, with a tiny team literally days before the premiere. There’s so many different types of water. There’s the puddle, there’s the lake, there’s the stormy seas, and the rain and all these different kinds of splashes. So, you have to draw a lot of new tools just for all these different moments.”

Most of the action occurs on the boat as the animals navigate their way to safety and learn to rely on each other. Zilbalodis studied a lot of videos to figure out how they might believably and interestingly behave in such circumstances. “I’ve had a cat like that, and I’ve had dogs as well, similar to the dog in the film,” he said. “And so basically, the cat, throughout the story, learns how to open up to others and work together, which is a journey similar to what I went through making this film because I used to work alone.

“But I didn’t want to have a simple message of being independent is bad and working together is good, so we wanted the dog character to balance this idea, to have it start out being very trustful, always looking for someone to tell them what to do. And it actually ends up being more independent and starts to think for itself. The lemur and the bird are looking for a kind of connection with others, someplace to belong to, and the big rodent is the only character that doesn’t change much.”

Yet the cat doesn’t have a simple arc, where it overcomes its fears and everything’s solved, which makes the journey more relatable. “It becomes more brave and kind of open to others,” Zilbalodis said. “But it still has those anxieties. I wanted to show that, even after all they’ve gone through, there’s some problems that you can’t fix, but you can learn how to live with them and kind of accept them.”