Gints Zilbalodis tells Screen how his dialogue-free animation Flow proved to be a learning experience in more ways than one.
A road movie like no other, Flow, the second full-length animated feature from Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, has been charming audiences and winning awards since its premiere in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard — including best animation awards at the Golden Globes, European Film Awards and from the New York and Los Angeles critics, and several prizes at Annecy.
Developed from the director’s 2012 short film Aqua and written with Matiss Kaza, the dialogue-free film tells the story of a cat who has to learn to live with and trust a group of disparate animals when they are thrown together on a sail boat after a tsunami floods the landscape.
Like Zilbalodis’s 2019 debut feature Away, about a person making his way back home from an isolated island, Flow is a personal story — but it marks several firsts for the director. The film is a big step up in terms of creative ambition, taking the audience on a trip through lush, verdant landscapes, abandoned ancient cities and vertiginous mountain ranges. It is also shot with the verve of a live-action movie, the camera hurtling with the characters through the undergrowth, diving into the depths and leaping into the skies.
“Away was quite minimalistic and spare, slower and more serious,” says Zilbalodis. “Flow has excitement and adventure and there’s more humour, which comes from [the characters’] personalities and behaviour. Flow is also a lot more immersive. Away was steady and wide, and with Flow I wanted the camera to be much closer to characters.”
Zilbalodis set up his own studio, Dream Well, to produce the film when the original plan to make Flow with another outfit fell through. Figuring out how to organise and run the studio, as well as having to work alongside a team of animators, was a new experience for the self-taught filmmaker, whose previous films were all one-man productions using techniques learnt from watching YouTube videos.
“I was quite anxious about it,” he says. “I’d never even worked as an animator in a studio. It was a lot of responsibility [in terms of the] budget and people’s time, but it was also rewarding. It meant I could sketch a drawing and give it to someone specialised in a certain area, who would create something better than anything I could. Or if I had a technical problem, I could just ask someone for help. It was very deliberate that the film is also about a cat having to work with and trust others.”
Produced by Dream Well, Belgium’s Take Five and France’s Sacrebleu Productions, the $3.7m budget film took five years to make, with pre-production, character design, concept art, modelling, effects, lighting and music all done in Latvia.
Character animation and sound were completed in France and Belgium — and it is in France where the film has excelled at the box office, with more than 450,000 admissions. In Latvia, which picked Flow as its submission to the international feature Oscar, admissions have exceeded 140,000, making it the top film of 2024 at Latvian cinemas. Worldwide box office — including $1.3m in North America for Janus Films — is $5.2m at press time. Curzon will release in the UK in March.
Virtual worlds
Rather than use storyboards, Zilbalodis created animatics. “I would create an environment in 3D before I even had specific scenes and I could explore it with a virtual camera,” he explains. “It’s almost like being a live-action location scout, where I could go onto a set and place the camera, and then move trees or mountains if I needed to.
“I used that technique to create the immersive quality, so you’re close to characters and inside their world, to create that intimacy,” he continues. “There’s no dialogue in the film so the camera has to convey the feelings that the characters have, and we could be a lot more expressive with sound, lighting, music and editing.”
One of the toughest obstacles was creating the water — and there is a lot of it. “I’m not sure why I decided to [have so much water] and I’d never do it again,” says Zilbalodis with a laugh. “Thematically it was very important. We had to develop all kinds of new tools just for the water, and different systems for the different kinds of water in the film. We needed people who were technically good in physics and programming but who were also creative.”
Zilbalodis found himself most at ease composing the score. “I write music at the same time as writing the script,” says the director, who came up with the music on a computer on which composer Rihards Zalupe would then work and record with an orchestra. “It’s almost a way to procrastinate, but it gives me new ideas for scenes, in terms of tempo and atmosphere. There are some scenes where music gets all the attention and there are no sound effects, so you can really feel the emotion and it’s not competing with the sounds. And there are some scenes where there is no music, it’s just sounds — that’s where you can sense all the textures of the wind and the water.”
When it came to animating the characters — which apart from the cat include a chilled-out capybara, a slightly dim golden retriever and an acquisitive lemur — the goal was to make the animals relatable. “There are no antagonists,” says the director, “so even if there is conflict, we can understand it.”
Zilbalodis declares himself “mostly positive” about the future of animation, in part because of the availability of free animation software such as Blender. “There are concerns about AI [artificial intelligence] and jobs, but people want to see animated stuff even if it’s made on a computer,” he says. “I’m excited about tools being available to people who didn’t have access to them, so films can be made on smaller budgets in places where it wasn’t possible before.”
Next up for the 30-year-old filmmaker is another first — an animated feature with dialogue, likely to be made by the same team behind Flow. “The story is about humans so wouldn’t make sense without dialogue,” he says. “It’s also to challenge myself. I don’t want to move to the US and work on a big studio film because [in Europe] you have more freedom in terms of story. You can tell more personal stories and be more bold with technique.”
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