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Having animals walking and talking like people in animation is a fairly common occurrence, but Flow director Gints Zilbalodis wanted to focus on immersing the viewer in a fully animal perspective. With no dialogue, the animated performances of the animals and the camerawork became essential to convey that message.
Flow follows a cat, whose solitary lifestyle changes once their home is devastated by a great flood. The cat must learn to overcome their fear of both water and others to survive, finding safety with a group of animals from different species. Zilbalodis says the dual fears play off of each other in the film, with the water becoming more turbulent whenever the cat becomes scared.
Flow was also shortlisted for the Oscars in the Best International Feature category, becoming the first entry from Latvia to make the international shortlist.
DEADLINE: What was the inspiration for Flow?
GINTS ZILBALODIS: When I was in high school, I decided to make a short film about my cat. I thought this idea of a cat being afraid of water was something very universal that doesn’t need to be explained, so we can tell that story without dialogue. It was not really about anything more specific. But then, years later, I decided to take this premise and adapt it into a feature, this time focusing more on the relationship that the cat has with other animals. I wanted to show that it has two fears in this story – the fear of water and the fear of others. They’re kind of in sync, so when the cat is afraid of the others, the water is very aggressive and scary, and when the cat becomes friendlier with the animals, then the water becomes more peaceful and beautiful.
I also wanted to tell the story without dialogue, and for them to behave like real animals and not walk on two legs and behave like people, because I feel like we’ve seen that already. Seeing the story from an animal point of view makes it more emotional and intense, like everything seems bigger from this subjective cat point of view. We don’t really understand the reason for some things because the cat doesn’t understand where the flood is coming from, but it can really immerse us in this world. If we explain too much, then I think that can take us out.
DEADLINE: What’s the process of making sure the animals move and perform as realistically as possible?
ZILBALODIS: I understood cats and dogs very well as I designed the story, but when the animators actually did the fine details of the movement and the performances, they looked at a lot of references for everything. Luckily, there’s an analyst library of cat videos and dog videos, and we filmed our own pets and went to the zoo. For the voices, we recorded real animals. And that was important, that they’re not humans mimicking animals. Even small details mattered, like we would look at how a cat’s ears move when they hear something. They might just move their ear, for example, but they may not even look at the source of the sound and when they look around, they look around with their heads but they don’t move their eyes. It feels more cartoony, but real cats actually move their heads a lot more than humans.
It’s about finding the balance. We described our approach as being naturalism rather than realism, where the difference is that we study real life but we don’t copy, we interpret it. There’s a lot of our own personalities as well, because we’re creating a story where looking at their own experiences and conveying these ideas and emotions. Sometimes if you do something realistically, it feels less real. As I mentioned, we use real animal voices, but a real capybara voice doesn’t fit this character. It’s very high pitched and unpleasant actually, so that’s the only character where we use a different animal, a camel.
DEADLINE: And visually, the animation is really just stunning. What made you want to use this style to tell the story?
ZILBALODIS: I wanted to create an immersive experience and for that, the camera is a very important tool. The camera is an active participant. It’s very close to the characters, and it feels like it’s being operated by a real person with these imperfections you see in the handheld movement. When the flood hits the camera, it can’t catch the shot perfectly and is struggling and I wanted to use these long takes. Some of these shots are almost five minutes long, and this also creates this immersive feeling, and that’s because of the camera.
But for the look of the film, I wanted it to be stylized and graphic. You see these brush strokes in the textures and the colors are somewhat exaggerated, but they’re still kind of grounded as well. You can sense the elements, you can feel how the water is wet and the grass is blowing in the wind, so for that reason we wanted to make the backgrounds more detailed than the characters to create this immersive feeling. I think if you have too much detail on the characters, then they can’t be as expressive and they lose some of the appeal. I wanted them to feel handmade and drawn, so you don’t see every strand of hair on their bodies, you just see this stylized silhouette. I think the audience can suspend their disbelief and this feels more real than actually seeing real animals. When we don’t fill out everything with hyper real detail, we’re kind of projecting our own experiences on these characters. We’re seeing our own cat or our own dog in this story, and it feels more intense because of that.
