‘Flow’ Director on the Feline Inspiration Behind His Cat-Focused Animated Environmental Fable
For Gints Zilbalodis, it all started with a cat.
Zilbalodis was still in high school, in Latvia, and dreaming of a career in animation, when he created a short film inspired by his pet feline. It was a simple tale, about a cat who overcomes his fear of water. “Many, many years later,” says Zilbalodis, “I decided to revisit this premise and make a feature film.”
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The result, Flow, is a long way from that hand-drawn short. The movie, Zilbalodis’ second full-length animated feature following his much-praised 2019 debut Away, imagines a post-apocalyptic world devoid of humans where only animals remain. Our feline hero, a skinny grey cat with wide saucer eyes and a twitchy suspicion of any and all other species, barely manages to escape a pack of hungry dogs before being caught up in a cataclysmic flood. Finding refuge on a battered sailboat, it reluctantly teams up with a geographically diverse pack of critters, including an easy-going capybara, a covetous lemur, a dim-witted Golden Retriever and an aloof secretary bird on a free-floating adventure.
Like Away, Flow is shot entirely without dialogue and combines near photo-realistic 3D environments and character design with a more abstract, painterly style that makes the CGI feel hand made.
Flow premiered in Cannes, where it was quickly snatched up for North America by Sideshow and Janus Films. It went on to win big at the Annecy animation festival, taking four trophies, including the audience prize for best feature. After smashing box office records back home, Flow got the nod to be Latvia’s official entry for the 2025 Oscar race in the best international feature category.
Along the way, Zilbalodis and his animated cat have been winning over audiences and critics. “Flow is a joy to experience but also a deeply affecting story,” raved The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney in his Cannes review. “The work of a unique talent who deserves to be ranked among the world’s great animation artists.”
Zilbalodis spoke to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Flow‘s U.K. premiere at the London Film Festival on making a movie with open-source software, using 3D technology to convey emotion and the unrivaled joys of watching internet cat videos.
Where did the idea for Flow come from originally?
The idea started a long time ago when I was still in high school. I made a short film about a cat who learns how not to be afraid of water. It was a much simpler story. It was hand-drawn, and it was just the cat. There was a bird, but it was really about the cat and the fear of water.
Many, many years later, I decided to revisit this premise and make a feature film. But this time, I really wanted to focus on the relationship between the animals, about the fear of others, which I think is more important [in Flow] than the cat’s fear of water. The water is basically a way to communicate those other fears. It’s kind of a metaphor. At first, when the cat is very afraid [of the other animals] the water seems very scary and aggressive. Later, as the cat and the other animals learn to work together, the water becomes more tranquil and peaceful.
I knew there would be no dialogue in the film because all the films I’ve done have had no dialogue. When I come up with my stories, I try to come up with stories where it makes sense that there’s no dialogue. So, in this case, it’s animals behaving like animals. That wasn’t really a limitation for me. I feel more comfortable telling stories without dialogue because then I can use the other tools of cinema and go deeper, and explore more: With the camera, with the music, with the editing. So the cat was there from the beginning but the story kept changing, kept evolving until we made the movie.
How long did it take you to make the film, from conception to finish?
The whole process was like five-and-a-half years. That includes the writing, fundraising and development. The production itself was faster. Five years is pretty typical, I think, for an animated feature to go through the development process. But it was pretty intense. I was doing this full-time, pretty much seven days a week. All day, every day. It’s a long time.
What was the final budget?
In euros? It’s about 3.5 million euros. So I think it’s a bit more in dollars, I guess ($3.83 million).
Did you produce it all out of Latvia?
It’s a co-production between three countries: Latvia, France and Belgium. We did pretty much everything in Latvia except the character animation and the sound. In Latvia, we did the pre-production, the writing, the designs, the modeling and texturing and lighting, the music and the post-production. But the actual movement of the characters and the performances were done by animators in France and Belgium. There’s a big animation industry in France — there are so many great animators there. Here in Latvia, it’s a lot smaller, there are a few indie studios but not that many really big players. It can be challenging to find the right people, and we had to train some people as well, not just train them how to animate but to work on this specific style. For me, it was pretty scary, starting my own studio, Dream Well Studio, in Latvia. I’d never even worked in a studio before; I’d always worked alone. So to start a new studio without really knowing how to do it was new for me, and scary, but I think maybe we came up with some more original approaches and skipped some steps that maybe weren’t necessary because we are used to working independently.
What was the most challenging aspects, technically, in creating this film?
The two biggest technical challenges were probably the water, which in animation is a huge challenge because there’s no one way of making water. Every scene — if the water is flat, if it’s a stormy sea, if there are some splashes — almost requires a different approach. We have to create systems for every single different type of water. It was one of the first things we started doing and one of the last things we finished.
The other big technical challenge was the long takes. There are plenty of them in this film where the camera keeps moving without really cutting. There are two shots, each of them almost five minutes long, and the camera is moving a lot through the environment. So while the environment is really big on screen they also have to be very detailed, because the camera is very close to the ground. We see the grass and all the detail from really up close. Some of those scenes got really heavy and our computers struggled to render all that. But the environments are very important because, since there’s no dialogue, we have to use everything else to tell the story. A lot of storytelling is being done through the environments.
What sort of tools did you use to create the 3D environments?
I don’t do storyboards. I create the animation directly. So I first make an environment [in the computer] that is not super detailed, but it gives me an approximate idea of the geography, and I place the characters within that environment. Then I take this virtual camera and I explore it. It’s almost like location scouting in a live-action movie. It’s a very spontaneous and kind of intuitive process. I know some filmmakers or artists can imagine the scenes exactly in their heads and have all the shots figured out, but I don’t imagine things like that. I need to go through that process and try different things. That’s why it’s necessary to make it directly in 3D, because [in this film] the camera is moving quite a lot, very deliberately, but it’s moving in depth. And it’s really hard to draw those very complicated camera movements. But within the 3D environment, I can have an approach closer to live action.
I sketch out the environment and find the shots, and when I have settled on a specific camera angle, we add more detail to the environment. Then we give it to concept artists [who] add a lot more detail. Then you bring it all back to my original scene and add the animation. The environments only work from this specific camera angle. We don’t have anything beyond the frame. We had to be very careful where we spent our money so we only did things that we knew would be really visible.
Was there a specific program you used for the initial 3D camera shots?
Pretty much the whole film was made in the software called Blender, which is a free, open-source software. It’s something everyone can just download for free and make films. A lot of students and up-and-coming filmmakers are using it, and it’s slowly becoming accepted in the industry as well. For us, it was really helpful on a small budget to have this free resource so we could really focus on the creative aspect and not worry too much about the technical things.
You started with the idea of a cat being afraid of water. Where did the other characters come from, the different animals?
It was kind of like a casting process for me. While writing the script, I was looking at different animals and thinking of the different chemistry that might arise from putting them together. What sort of conflicts, what kind of comedy, could arise from those interactions? After the cat, I added the dog, the Golden Retriever, because I had like two dogs like that and I knew them well. The cat in the film is on this journey of learning, learning how to trust others and work together. But I wanted to balance this idea with this dog character who is on an opposite journey, who starts out being very trustful, almost too trustful, who doesn’t think for itself. And throughout this journey, it learns how to be more independent.
I didn’t want to have this didactic message of: Working together is good and being independent is bad. I wanted to show the good and the bad of both of these extremes.
The other animals were also decided based on one of the main themes of the film, which is about wanting to find a group that accepts you for who you are. The lemur is really obsessed about collecting objects, but it’s partly about wanting to be accepted by his group. The bird is also quite obsessed about being accepted within their group. The only character that doesn’t have that sort of character arc, who doesn’t change much, is the capybara. It’s like this wise mentor to all the characters, always at peace and always happy with everything. The reason I chose the capybara is because I’ve seen images of all kinds of animals interacting with capybaras and being peaceful with them, even predators. I thought it would be funny, but also poignant, to have this character that gets along with everyone.
How did you do the voicing? Are those humans imitating animals or actual animal voices?
Our approach was to use real animal voices. We wanted the naturalistic feeling of being immersed in this world. So we recorded a bunch of animals, and our sound designer [Gurwal Co?c-Gallas] recorded his own cat. Gurwal’s cat is usually quite chatty, always meowing. But when he pointed a microphone at it, it shut up. He had to hide microphones all over his house and record it secretly.
We tried to record a capybara, but they don’t really speak. They’re very silent. They only make noise when you tickle them. So it was one person’s very fun job to tickle a capybara. But the sound was really high-pitched and sounded more like an anxious small dog. It didn’t fit the character. So we looked around for another animal and, after a long kind of search, we settled on this baby camel. So the capybara is actually voiced by a baby camel. All the others are the real animals. Even the different breeds of dog.
Sound is obviously a big part of making the film feel realistic. People kind of imagine what the animals are saying, even though they can’t understand them. But I think most of the talking is really done through the visuals, through the body language, through the camera’s point of view. That’s how we see how the animals view the world.
We spent a lot of time making sure we had these micro-movements in the eyes so that you feel these animals are alive. It was really tricky to get right but I think when you look at their eyes, you get the sense they are thinking, that there is a deep feeling there. We’re just using all the different tools of cinema to convey story and emotion without dialogue.
It’s interesting what you say about the eyes, because there is a real sense of life behind them, in every character. They stand out in a way that some of the background landscape animation, which is often less detailed, almost painterly.
About that: Making some of the backgrounds less detailed was intentional, not because of any technical or financial limitations. We really didn’t want to put too much detail where it’s not necessary. We let the backgrounds and some elements be less detailed so we could focus on what is important and kind of create a more abstract, simplified or graphic image. I feel we’ve seen hyper-realistic animation for so long, it’s been done, and I’m not really interested in that anymore. I’m more interested in the way, artistically or creatively, people can choose which details are important and which are not.
Regarding the eyes: That was another great job for the animators, who had to spend hours watching cat videos on YouTube and really study them. We didn’t use any motion capture or anything like that. It was all animated by hand. We weren’t trying to create something realistic. We’re interpreting real life. We studied our references, but we really interpreted them and put our own emotions into these characters.
Do you feel we have become limited in what we expect from animation because the photo-realistic style of the big Hollywood studios is so dominant?
I think animation is not one thing. It can do very different things, very different forms of cinematic storytelling. We used the technique that was right for this story. Maybe a different story might require a different technique. But I think if you try to create something really realistic, it might not age as well as something more abstract. A more stylized look can be more timeless, like a fable. The focus should always be on the creative aspect, on the storytelling and the emotion, rather than the technology. Our style is not decoration, it’s really our way of conveying emotion. And I feel that’s what cinema is for. It’s not a tech demo. People go to the cinema to feel something.
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