Yahoo Lifestyle How a Lone Feline Upended the Feature Animation Oscar Race With ‘Flow’
One of the surprises of the awards season is Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow” — the dialog-free tale of a solitary cat’s emotional journey as it learns to survive after a great flood — which upended the feature animation race when it won the Golden Globe. Combined with honors such as the Los Angeles Film Critics prize in animation, Latvia’s “Flow” went on to receive a pair of Oscar nods, including best international feature and animated feature — underscoring the message that animation is film, and not just for kids.
Other animated Academy Award contenders include DreamWorks Animation’s hit “The Wild Robot” — the fourth Oscar nom for writer/director Chris Sanders — which earned additional noms for its sound and composer Kris Bowers’ score. Based on Peter Brown’s book, it follows a sentient robot stranded on an uninhabited island. At press time it won additional honors including the PGA Award for an animated feature and nine Annie Awards including best feature.
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The strong list of nominees include Disney/Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” which earned $1.7 billion worldwide and was the highest grossing movie of 2024. The sequel to Oscar-winner “Inside Out” got us in touch with our feelings as young Riley reached puberty and experienced new emotions from envy to ennui to, notably, a heavy dose of anxiety.
Aardman and Netflix’s stop-motion “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” delivered a new adventure featuring the beloved inventor and his loyal pooch. The popular franchise’s creator and four-time Oscar-winner Nick Park and Aardman vet Merlin Crossingham’s tale also marked the return of the studio’s most infamous villain, the penguin Feathers McGraw, who was first introduced in Park’s Oscar-winning short “The Wrong Trousers.”
Also demonstrating the strength of indie animation is the lauded “Memoir of a Snail” from Adam Elliot (2004 animated short Oscar-winner for “Harvie Krumpet”). His adult-themed clay animated story follows a snail enthusiast who undergoes hardships and learns to love herself despite them.
Since its release, “Flow” (a co-production between Latvia, Belgium and France) has become Latvia’s most-viewed film and the country’s first Golden Globe nomination and win (the award went on display in one of the country’s museums). Last weekend, it won a pair of Annie Awards including best independent animated feature and one for writing. The film was made with free open-source software Blender for just $3.6 million, though it’s the film’s meditative storytelling and universal themes that seem to be connecting with voters.
The origin of “Flow” stems from a short that Zilbalodis made in high school about a cat who has to overcome his fear of water. He again turned to a feline for his protagonist when years later — and with a few projects under his belt including his first feature — Zilbalodis had an opportunity to work with a “bigger” budget and team, which also inform the narrative.
“I wanted to tell a story about those fears I had, and that time of learning how to trust others and how to collaborate with them,” Zilbalodis says. “I wanted to use these experiences to find, hopefully, something authentic and honest. I decided to revisit that story about a cat who’s afraid of water because a cat would be a great protagonist for this story, because in the beginning it needs to be very independent and self-sufficient, and as it goes on this journey and learns to trust, it changes.”
While timeless, the film also touches on relevant subjects including the impact of climate change, though Zilbalodis says these evolved organically and were not the initial goal of the story.
“I always start with something more abstract and more kind of emotional — in this case, it was about the cat in the water. And it just made sense to kind of have this big flood to kind of show it in the scariest way possible,” Zilbalodis explains, noting that this catastrophe then involved “destroying the cat’s home and forcing it to kind of find a new way of living and leaving its home and meeting other displaced animals.”
Animation and the use of animals, he found, was the right way to tell this story. “Sometimes you need true fiction, we can find something deeper about real life, especially in animation … I think we can see more of ourselves through this kind of allegory.”
He adds that there’s an innocence to these animals and also moments of lightness. “We all have the same fears and wants. And I think through these animals, we can see kind of how a society reacts to certain disasters, and how sometimes these characters can act selfishly or sometimes they support each other,” he says, adding that there are no simple answers. “I think that would be false and dishonest if we have everything solved by the end, and then the audience leaves the theater and just thinks, ‘OK, everything is solved; we don’t need to do anything.’”
Zilbalodis designed his naturalistic, emotive cat and key characters while the team also worked on characters. The world, he relates, was inspired by real places with references from Southeast Asia to Central America, though they wanted to create something new, without modern-day structures to give it a timeless feeling.
The animation is created to appear as if it was shot in long, uninterrupted takes for an immersive feel inspired by live action filmmaking. Zilbalodis, whose influences range from Akira Kurosawa to Ang Lee and Martin Scorsese, notes that “the movement of the camera can express fear or curiosity, and I wanted it to feel kind of grounded as well.”
The multihyphenate collaborated on the score alongside Latvian composer Rihards Zaļupe. He notes that as a dialog-free film, the music was all the more vital in the storytelling. The minimalistic score is sometimes peaceful or meditative. Zaļupe played some of the instruments, and the score was performed by Latvia’s Riga Symphony.
Zilbalodis hopes that more independent films will be made and also seen; indeed, this year’s varied crop of animated films as well as recent ones such as 2024 Oscar-winner “The Boy and the Heron” from Hayao Miyazaki (who has also inspired Zilbalodis’ work) are making that sentiment a reality.
He notes the choice to use Blender to make “Flow” was not a compromise. “It’s as good as a tool as any out there, and for a smaller budget, it just makes sense to find [efficiencies],” he says, advising indie filmmakers “not to get too carried away about the technology and the tools. … It doesn’t matter if it’s the most expensive, extravagant film ever. I think people really care about stories.”
Another challenge for indies is finding an audience. “But I think that’s happening,” he says, noting that “Flow” found most of its distributors at Cannes, where the movie premiered. “‘Flow’ is quite universal; that really helped it to find this global audience … Animation, especially, can transcend these boundaries. I think people are accepting that animated films can be for kids, which is fantastic, but it can be for all kinds of audiences,” he continues. “You don’t necessarily need to make a billion dollars and to please every single person in the world. It can appeal to a kind of more specific audience.”
Looking ahead, he is optimistic about the state of the animation world. “I think there’s so much more potential to be explored that we’re just starting,” he concludes, adding that he thinks independent animation will see a “big explosion, very soon.”
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