How ‘Flow’ became the unlikely punk-rock Oscar contender
As rebel filmmaker Werner Herzog famously beseeched budding directors: "If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab, and do it!" The point wasn't to advocate larceny, but rather to promote a DIY approach to filmmaking, finding innovative, inexpensive solutions to create art. No recent film better exemplifies this punk-rock ethos than Flow.
An international coproduction of Latvia, France, and Belgium, Flow has emerged as an unlikely Oscar contender with its dialogue-free tale of a collection of animals (centrally a cat) surviving a massive flood. While studio animated fare like Toy Story 3, Cars 2, or Tangled have seen budgets ballooning to $200 million and beyond, Flow was made for a miniscule $3.8 million. The secret to its cost-efficiency? The project was entirely crafted on Blender, a free, open-source 3D modeling software, with a team small enough to fit on a charter bus.
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The film had a simple origin story: five years ago, director Gints Zilbalodis had a laptop and a concept inspired by his earlier short film Aqua. For years, he worked solo before eventually filling out a core team of about 20 people. It was produced at Latvia’s Dream Well Studio, where the preproduction, modeling, texturing, music, and color grading were completed, with the character animation finished by talented artists from France and Belgium. Blender is highly adaptable with a real-time render engine and can run on an off-the-shelf laptop, allowing Zilbalodis and the team to develop and test new features instantaneously. For example, the film required one tool for when the ocean was active and an entirely different tool for underwater scenes and other water effects.
Along the way it has become the little movie that could. The first Latvian film ever nominated for an Academy Award, Flow has already made more than five times its budget, tallying $20 million at the box office take. It has won awards at such festivals as Annecy and the Animation Is Film and netted the top animated film prize from the Golden Globes and Los Angeles and New York film critics groups. At Saturday's Spirit Awards, Flow won Best International Feature (the event does not have an animated feature category). It currently ranks second to The Wild Robot in the Gold Derby odds for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.
The real lesson Zilbalodis took from taking the low-budget route was how new tools democratize the filmmaking process. "Any kid can pick up and now has the access to tools that these big feature films [are using]," he told Gold Derby. "It's free, and there are resources online. We just learned from watching YouTube videos. This already has been a very exciting change for more and more independent films. We can make these films with a smaller budget. These tools are not a compromise in any way. It's just as good, or even better, than some of the very expensive tools out there."
Contributing to Flow's ethereal vibe is its dialogue-free visual storytelling, capturing Alfred Hitchcock’s dictum (chronicled in the book Hitchcock/Truffaut) that “when we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.” While not necessarily a model for all movies, Flow, like 2017's dialogue-sparse live-action entry A Ghost Story (made for a reported $100,000), showcases the potential for filmmakers to inexpensively make visually immersive, thoughtful films employing modern tools and inventive filmmaking.
Flow may be one of the more unique success stories of recent years, but it’s a shining example of how directors can thrive amid the current complexities of movie-making. Zilbalodis started with what he had: a laptop, free and capable software, vision, and talent, expanding the team only where needed to create a marvel of an animated adventure. The approach proved remarkably cost-effective and gave the filmmaker considerable autonomy to make an Oscar-caliber narrative that’s elegant and unforgettable.
Watch the Gold Derby interview with Gints Zilbalodis:
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