Expanding on a premise he conceived as a teenager, director Gints Zilbalodis has crafted a mesmerising, dialogue-free animation that has taken home the Best Animated Feature Academy Award. Here, he tells Michael Leader how it came together.
Animated animals are everywhere this year: they’re on pilgrimages to Peru, they’re turning robots wild, they’re committing fowl vengeance on unsuspecting amateur inventors (and their long-suffering canine companions). Well… what else is new? From Mickey to Mufasa, be they cuddly, cartoony, anthropomorphised or photorealistic, animation is an animal kingdom.
And on this endless tide comes Flow, an ark of innovation that wends its way between the big-budget blockbusters and the fleet-of-foot indie upstarts to chart new waters in feature animation. This wordless wonder follows the fortunes of several unlucky creatures – including a cat, a gang of boisterous dogs, a capybara, a stately secretary bird and a wide-eyed lemur – as their forest home is submerged by a devastating flood. When the water levels rise, the boundaries between species are tested and shaky alliances are formed, and they explore and endure this new landscape together.
Flow (2025)
Flow represents a new high-water mark for the young Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis, who has been crafting homemade, computer-generated animation since he was a teenager. This new phase of his career sees him working for the first time with a small but crucial team of collaborators – albeit one numbered in the dozens, rather than the hundreds who churn out a Disney or Pixar production. It has taken him from the desktop to the Debussy Theatre in Cannes, where Flow received its world premiere in May 2024, but inspiration struck closer to home, and brought Zilbalodis full circle back to his beginnings as a filmmaker. ‘When I was in high school I had a cat,’ he explains. ‘And I made a short film about this cat who overcomes its fear of water. It was quite a simple hand-drawn film, but something about this premise stuck with me.’
Flow (2025)
Thanks to their stripped-back storytelling, lack of dialogue and elegantly evocative, mononymic titles, Zilbalodis’ films are infused with a certain mystery. They give away nothing more than is absolutely necessary: all the better to thrill and enthral. However, for the director, it’s first and foremost a pragmatic approach. ‘I think it’s good to have limitations,’ he says. ‘With animation you can write whatever you want, and you have infinite possibilities, so you don’t know where to begin. Having no dialogue and knowing that it’s just animals, at least you have something to start with, and then you can be more expressive with all the other tools you have.’
Where many animators might work out their ideas on paper, Zilbalodis finds his creative spark by navigating the three-dimensional void within his computer, skipping the conventional storyboarding stage of filmmaking and bringing sequences to life as a rough ‘animatic’ in the free, open-source animation software Blender. ‘It would be hard to explain my intention to storyboard artists, because I don’t really know my intention,’ he says. ‘I need to kind of discover it. It is quite creative and spontaneous, and I don’t know where I will end up with a shot.’
Flow (2025)
As he builds a scene and places his camera and characters within it, Zilbalodis draws inspiration from the long takes and impactful composition of directors like Alfonso Cuarón and Steven Spielberg, and the mastery of movement and space found in the films of Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki. The result is something akin to The Incredible Journey (1963) by way of Saving Private Ryan (1998), Children of Men (2006) or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) – yet it is wholly its own experience, by turns spectacular and surreal, propulsive and poetic, and engrossing for audiences both young and old.
The flooded landscapes of Flow are populated with hints of a wider world, from an abandoned workshop surrounded by cat statues, to a majestic city where the streets have been transformed into canals. The distinct lack of people soon becomes unavoidable, and in these brief moments of respite a multitude of themes bubbles to the surface, giving the film an environmentalist, almost post-apocalyptic edge. And at the heart of it all are the innocent animals – literally refugees in a small boat – left to fend for themselves in a devastated world abandoned by humans.
Flow (2025)
Zilbalodis intentionally leaves these textures of his film open to interpretation. As with the subtly stylised designs of the characters, he prefers to invite the viewer to fill in the gaps themselves rather than fleshing out every detail. ‘People bring their own experiences to this,’ Zilbalodis elaborates, nodding to how the film has been embraced by international audiences from Busan to Belfast. ‘Without dialogue, there’s a universal aspect, and it resonates equally with everyone. Everyone says it’s their cat.’
Flow (2025)
For the filmmaker himself, though, this has been a very personal journey: a search for connection through animation. Just as his feline protagonist must learn to survive by overcoming its fear of water and connecting with its fellow animals, this one-man-band wunderkind has learned to work with others, and has expanded his creative horizons in the process. ‘It’s a personal story,’ Zilbalodis says. ‘I was afraid of whether people would even understand it. If they do understand it, I feel like I’m being understood. Most of us are seeking that. That’s a really nice feeling.’
Flow is out in cinemas in March
