As Flow continues to delight audiences, filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis s Ella Kemp to chat cats, comparisons to the video game Stray and the greatest joys of doing it all yourself.
Sometimes, it is easier to communicate some things with images or music, rather than trying to do that with words.
—Gints ZilbalodisThe world is ending, and a cat needs to seek shelter: the story of Flow, the second animated feature from Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis, trusts that a simple concept can hold great peril, joy and imagination all in one. The waters rise in an unnamed place (where don’t they?) as dogs, birds, a lemur and a capybara the black cat to find safety.
Flow opened in the final days of this year’s Cannes Film Festival—a perfect tale for weary heads that whisks you away from the chaos of those buzzy moments, with a whole different set of stakes. “I will suck the ocean dry with a straw for that cat,” threatens Nat, while Carley does her best to hold it together: “I bring a kind of crying throughout vibe to the screening of Flow that my fellow moviegoers don’t really appreciate.” The film already sits at a 4.0 average rating, after screening at Cannes, Annecy (where it won three awards, including from both the jury and audience), Ottawa, Melbourne, New Zealand, Toronto, Busan, London and more.
With a recent release in US theaters (it’s coming to the UK in March of next year), Flow has already won Best Animated Film at both the NYFCC Awards and the National Board of Review. The accolades are countless, but the intentions remain the same: multihyphenate cat person Zilbalodis stops by to break it all down for Letterboxd.
Gints Zilbalodis: Because there’s no dialogue, it’s important to have clarity to everything. We must understand the motivation of the characters, their goals and fears. Because it’s a cat, the fear of water is something that you don’t need to explain. What was challenging was having this ensemble of five main characters, and having each of them go on a journey. They’re all there to or challenge the cat, but I wanted all the other ones also to be interesting enough, too. But it’s like with music: if you have too many notes, it gets too busy and noisy.
My favorite type of music is very minimalistic. There’s a sparseness to that; you don’t have anything unnecessary there. I didn’t want to waste time on something that doesn’t really impact the character. We’re not explaining what happens to the humans, and where this flood comes from, because we’re experiencing it from the cat’s point of view. We don’t explain it with words, but tried to leave some clues for the audience to figure it out for themselves, which I think is more interesting: to pay attention, and not just spoon-feed this information.
All the animal voices are real animals. They’re not humans mimicking animals, and that was important to have that grounded quality. When I discovered that different cats sound differently, we mostly had to use one cat. There’s no voice actor, so the sound designer is basically like an actor. Then, it’s not just technical things you consider: it’s the motivation, the psychology of these characters.
The sounds play a big part, but, of course, it’s also the movements themselves, which for the cat, are quite complicated, because they don’t follow any rules. They’re very flexible and almost like liquid. They can squash and stretch, and they’re very expressive with their tails and ears, especially. What I discovered is that cats don’t really look around with their eyes. They tend to look around with their heads. Sometimes, when you see animated films where they look around with their eyes, they feel more cartoony. Luckily, there’s an endless library of cat videos that we could study!
I played Stray, too, but our story was already finished and we were going into production. I’m not sure it influenced Flow, but I’m definitely a fan of the game—it’s beautiful. In of the look and style of the film, we’re trying to stay close to the characters. We’re not observing from a distance; the camera is an active storyteller. I wanted to use these long takes: some shots are almost five minutes long, and it creates this subjective feeling, almost like you are the cat, jumping around these different places. Animation is the only way you can do that.
You can play the game, but the cat in that game is like an observer. It’s the audience’s point of view. In Flow, the cat is more like an emotive character. I really don’t mind video game comparisons: it’s usually not a nice thing to say, but in this case, I think it is. Games are a part of our lives. I don’t play as much anymore as I used to, but I’m influenced by films and games and music, and so it’s all meshed together in Flow.
The camera was more influenced by live-action films with these long, long shots and wide-angle lenses, which you also see in video games. You don’t see conventional coverage with close-ups and wide shots—you see this wide-angle lens following the characters, and this allows the audience to look around themselves and decide what to look at within the frame. I wanted to do that: you can look at the main story, you can look at the cat, but there are certain things hidden in the backgrounds. I also wanted to have this graphic style where it’s more abstract, where you don’t render every strand of hair. It’s more like a hand-drawn image, and that, again, you see in some indie video games, which allow themselves to be deliberate with detail. If you have too much detail, it can take you out of the experience. It’s not just some random cats!
I’m a fan of Alfonso Cuarón, his long takes, and how there are multiple stories within the frame. I love Children of Men. I like Akira Kurosawa and the way he uses elements, like wind and rain, visually but also with the sounds. There’s dynamic movement, but moments of calm in nature.
Japanese filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki film nature in a way where you can reflect on what you just saw—there are no wall-to-wall jokes, because by having the slower parts it makes the action more intense in that contrast. I also love the way Sergio Leone worked with Ennio Morricone in pre-production, and had the music played on set. I write the music while I’m writing the script as well, and it influences not just the atmosphere and rhythm but even how the story develops.
I made my first feature, Away, by myself, and that was a conscious decision to do all these different tasks, so that, eventually, if I would have a chance to work with a team, I could understand them much better. I think a filmmaker should understand the basics of all these different departments. Of course, you’re not going to become an expert, but the basics are pretty fast to learn. Music is the most fun for me. I do it at the same time as writing the script, because writing is the most difficult part.
It’s the time where I tend to procrastinate the most. I can’t write for a long time. My way of procrastinating is to work on the music—it’s very fun and fast. Animation takes months and months, but we can make a piece of music in a few hours. With each of my films, I try to delegate a little bit more, but I also do these things because I enjoy them. I don’t have to do the same thing every day, so it’s always interesting to me. Sometimes, I don’t even know what I want. I was told the director should know what they want, but I don’t know when I begin the process. I need to go through this process of discovery to understand these things better. Sometimes, it is easier to communicate some things with images or music, rather than trying to do that with words.
