Flow | Interview with Oscar winner Gints Zilbalodis

03 March 2025 // Interviews

Flow, which last night picked up the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, is a major achievement. The film follows a cat’s journey to surviving a biblical flood, an adventure through an unfamiliar version of Earth that forces it to build relationships with animals it previously saw as predators. Made entirely in Blender, the film exhibits astonishing watercolour art mapped on top of CG models, a framework that allows for dynamic camera movements and exhilarating one-shot scenes. Having been produced at a modest budget of $3.8m, Flow looks just as good, if not better, than any film to come out of Hollywood in 2024.

Collaborating to bring Flow to life are studios from France, Belgium and Latvia, the latter being the home country of the film’s director, Gints Zilbalodis. Zilbalodis impressed audiences in 2019 with his film Away, which mirrors Flow’s dialogueless mode of storytelling. His own studio, Dream Well, crafted the Oscar-tipped feature with Take Five and Sacrebleu Productions with staggering results.

Skwigly caught up with Zilbalodis in a noisy hotel during the London Film Festival to discuss the worldwide response of the film, the camera technique he employs and filmmaking on a budget.

How has the response been to the film?

I’ve been asked if people respond differently around the world, but I think it’s interesting that I don’t think they do. It’s a similar response which means it’s working in all these places. I’m just glad that there is a response because we didn’t know if it would work or not because we didn’t test it during production. We only watched it with the team, and the first time I watched with an audience was at Cannes during the premiere, so it’s just a relief that it’s working.

Have you noticed a difference in the response of kids and adults?

Usually, the kids are interested in the story and what happens to the character and what things mean. It’s tricky to answer those questions; I want to leave some of those answers as a mystery, or let the audience think about them, but I’m happy to kind of speak about my intentions and feelings I had with these scenes. With adults, they’re more interested in the technique and the making of and my story, which I’m also happy to speak about.

With animation technology developing so quickly, is it hard to find people who can pull off an art style like Flow’s?

It’s exciting that things are evolving and tools are becoming more accessible and so films can be made on smaller budgets and look bigger than they actually are. It’s good to keep evolving. We did have to teach people, but it’s not just about the new tools, but it’s about the specific technique, the specific style and the creative aspect that we’re choosing. It was challenging, I felt like I was just figuring it out myself and it’s hard to convey things to others when I’m still learning myself. The film looks the way it does because I was looking for that balance between naturalism, where you feel all these details and you’re very immersed in this world and you can sense all the textures, but if you look closely, it’s more abstract than you would think. You can see some brush strokes and we only put detail where it’s really necessary. We also tried to have the characters be a little bit more stylized than the backgrounds because I think the characters can feel a bit more appealing. It’s not one specific cat in the film, everyone can see their own cat in this cat because we leave a little bit of room for imagination. And because there’s no dialogue, we can be more expressive with the look. You can be more active with the camera and tell the story more visually, which I find exciting.

How do you balance drawing emotion from the characters without anthropomorphising them too much?

The animation is quite expressive, but also we can understand them through the other tools of cinema, which is the music, the sound, the staging and the blocking. It allows us to show all the thoughts that they have. I feel like the animals are so expressive and interesting that if you make them more human, that wouldn’t add anything. I think that would be distracting. The story becomes more engaging and emotional by looking at these animals going through this.

Was it important to have a dynamic camera?

Yes, I’ve used similar techniques in other films but haven’t pushed the technique as far as here, but it’s very intuitive, it’s very spontaneous. I didn’t have a very detailed plan for the technique, I kind of discovered it during the process. I was excited about using the camera like this because I don’t use storyboards, I just make the animatic directly in 3D. I do it because I don’t imagine the scenes before I’ve made them. I have a basic idea, but it’s not like I see the scene in my head. I create a set and then I explore it and I discover ideas. It’s almost like a documentary approach. It’s necessary for the long takes to have that approach because the camera is moving a lot in space, and the perspective is changing, and it’s turning 360 degrees and flying up in the air and going underwater. It’s really hard to draw that so having that animatic technique allows that.

The reason for [the dynamic camera] is to make you feel very close to the cat. You have to almost feel like you are the cat in the film and have that subjective point of view. The camera can also sometimes behave like a character in its own right, where it can feel emotion and be impacted by the elements, getting swept up by the water, or show curiosity or fear. It’s a very important tool for me as a director, and so I spend a lot of time kind of figuring it out. The hope is that it feels quite effortless and you’re not thinking about it too much, but there is a lot of like work going on to create this dance between the characters and the camera, trying to combine shots and not cutting from a wide shot to a close up, trying to figure out if we can maybe move the camera closer to characters, or move the characters closer to the camera. That’s one of my favourite parts of the whole process.

What’s it like directing a co-production between three countries?

It was a pretty smooth process. I’ve described this film as a narrative about my own experience of learning how to work in a team, just like the cat does. But when I wrote the script, I was anticipating a lot more conflict and drama and anxiety, but actually the whole process was a lot more smooth. We had great collaborators, and in terms of working with three different countries, it wasn’t that complicated. After Covid, we’re all used to working remotely. I would visit the team in France often but I had to be in our Latvian studio and spent most of the time there. It was just great that the producers trusted me and allowed me to make the film in the technique that I had chosen which was quite unproven and unpredictable. It helped that I had made a film before and maybe because it’s a pretty small production we have more flexibility to take bigger risks.

I learned so much from working with the sound designer as well, learning about how less is more and not using every sound all the time. I learned a lot from the animators too, they would bring so many great ideas and so much personality to the characters. I wanted to allow the animators to have input in the scenes. They’re not simply technicians, they’re artists, so if they have a good idea, I’ll try to incorporate it even though it might create more work for me. It was easier to do because the team was quite small. There was direct communication. I want to stay in this budget range for my next one, to maintain that small team spirit.

Films in the US have budgets more than 10 times the size of Flow’s, do you think there’s a bit of wastefulness on films of that size?

It’s not even 10, it’s like 50 times smaller than the Pixar films. But Flow is also at least 50 times bigger than my previous film, so I had to readjust myself. But no, I’ve never worked in a big studio, so I don’t know how it works there, but I think having a smaller budget forces you to focus more and not waste any resources. I really felt that responsibility not to have any deleted scenes. We didn’t make any big changes during production, we stayed on course. I think there’s room for both bigger films and for smaller ones, but for animation, it’s great that these smaller films can really compete with the big ones, maybe unlike live action. In animation I think the gap is a lot more blurred because the technology isn’t that important, it’s really about the story and emotion. If you get that right, it can have a bigger impact than something very expensive and polished.

How did pitching at Cartoon Movie help the film?

We were already quite full steam ahead at that moment, we had most of the funding. That was to let the world know about us. But we need these kinds of events, especially for indie films, to help us stand out.

I love the unexplained mysteries of the film like the statues and ruins. Where did the idea for those come from?

I wanted to create that sense of adventure and evoke a sense of curiosity and amazement that the cat would feel where everything is unexpected and interesting. It’s not really set in our ordinary world, it’s meant to be very timeless. It could be set in recent times, or it could be set a very long time ago. The environment is a big part of the storytelling, because we have to use it to make the audience feel what the characters are feeling. I knew that the film would be set in a boat, but I didn’t want it to be set in some ocean where there’s just the wide horizon, so by having this flooded world where we see all these monuments and relics of the past, we can have a big variety in the environment so it doesn’t feel claustrophobic or repetitive. I didn’t want to explain it all. I wanted to leave some clues for the audience so they I think about what might have happened here, they have to actively participate in the story.

What films or shows directly inspired Flow?

I will mention Future Boy Conan, a Miyazaki series which even some Ghibli fans might not have seen. It’s also set in this flooded world. I would mention some films of Alfonso Curon in terms of the use of camera. There’s also a film called I Am Cuba, which is from the 60s and does some crazy camera moves.

Flow is released in UK cinemas March 21st

Flow | Interview with Oscar winner Gints Zilbalodis

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