CEEA Talks: Gints Zilbalodis about FLOW “I’d prefer to be a capybara”
Not so long ago Gints Zilbalodis was just the eccentric Latvian director who made the unique animated film AWAY. But for FLOW he was at the helm of a team of animators to create an epic adventure. FLOW consistently ignores all success formulas, but makes jaws drop in admiration. A film with only animal characters, immersed in silence, without dialogue, set in a world we hardly recognise as our own. At least 60% of the film takes place aboard a boat!
Festival passages in Cannes and Annecy (4 awards, including the Jury and the Audience Award), and an EFA for Best Animation launched a hype. The French release quickly surpassed the 300,000 viewers mark, and numbers are still rising as we speak. Regardless Zilbalodis’ reputation as a loner, all partners are full of praise for their fine collaboration, as evidenced by Belgian co-producer Gregory Zalcman (Take Five) in this interview.
The little cat Flow sees the whole world flooded with water. Not a human being is to be seen. On a small boat, a handful of animals gather: a dog, a capybara, a lemur, and a bird. The animals must learn to cooperate with each other to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
How do you feel about dogs?
Gints Zilbalodis: I love dogs! I’ve had two dogs myself and the dog in the film is inspired by both of them. I prefer dogs over cats…
Sorry… then this interview is over!
Zilbalodis: … but my own personality is closer to that of a cat. I like to do things my own way, independently. But I was surprised when people considered FLOW as anti-dog propaganda, only because it is made from a cat’s point of view. Sometimes you have to allow a story to take you where it wants to take you.
You realised beforehand that from now on, wherever you’ll go, people will want to share their personal cat stories with you? You’re doomed!
Zilbalodis: People come to show me pictures of their cats, indeed. They might have seen similar stories before, but never from a cat’s point of view. We feel more emotionally engaged with animal characters, we care more about their well-being. If the cat acts like a total bastard, we easily forgive. We wouldn’t forgive so easily if it were a human character.
A huge number of partners were involved in this project, probably a hundred times more than with your ‘solo project’ AWAY.
Zilbalodis: I started this five-year-long process by myself, later a screenwriter joined in, and gradually we found our production partners. Dream Well Studio from Latvia is the main producer, with Sacrebleu Productions (France) and Take Five (Belgium) as co-producers. Dream Well had never run a production of this scale before. In our studio we had about five people working – which already felt like ‘a lot’ – and we had another 20 animators working in France and Belgium. Together with animation supervisor Léo Silly Pélissier, I instructed the animators, explaining the concept and correcting draft files. Over the years I gained some experience in almost every single aspect of animation. That’s how I came to master the terminology to explain my wishes to them.
Gregory Zalcman (Take Five): There was a great synergy among the producers; we were all on the same page. After we did SIROCCO AND THE KINGDOM OF THE WIND together with Sacrebleu, they asked us on board. I watched a basic version of the animatic and it already had everything in it: the whole story was rolled out and even without sound I could perfectly picture the world it was set in. Costs in Latvia are quite low, but making an animated film of this size on a €3.5 million budget is a miracle anyway. And the workflow among partners was easy and simple.
How was the work divided among the partners?
Zalcman: With Take Five, we took care of 20% of the animation, and all the bruitage and mixing. French sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas listed what he needed, which we then delivered from our studio. The mixing was extremely important. Due to the lack of dialogue, the intensity of the sound was decisive.
Was there one first image in your mind when you started thinking about this film, a vision from which the rest of the story sprouted?
Zilbalodis: In school I made the short film AQUA (2012) about a cat overcoming its fear for water. Now I picked up the idea again. That short was set on an open ocean, but this feature needed more than just a horizon; it needed different landscapes.
Quite bizarre landscapes, I would say. Where exactly do we end up?
Zalcman: Everywhere and nowhere. You think you recognise things – a Cambodian temple, a mountain landscape in China… – but there is no concrete location. The mix of Eastern and Western cultural elements makes it universal and timeless.
Zilbalodis: The cat needed a home from which to flee. The statues of cats around the house indicate that maybe a sculptor has lived here. But throughout the journey, the surroundings gradually become more and more exotic.
But also somewhat ominous…
Zalcman: The palpable threat of the water makes the animals anxious. But after a while, nature takes its place again. Water spawned life. It is paradoxical to say that nature is a threat because everything that lives is part of nature. It is mankind who is the biggest threat.
Does that make FLOW an ecological story?
Zalcman: You could call FLOW an ecological fable, which children will presumably understand on an emotional level. This is a world without people, but we don’t know where they have gone. Are there still humans out there? Did they flee to a different place? Did their mismanagement cause this deluge? Did they die in a pandemic? The film urges you to use your imagination, because you won’t get ready-made answers.
In those landscapes, different styles, influences and patterns can be recognised.
Zilbalodis: The boat sails through landscapes, which are not just decorative, but essential parts of the story. I started developing the camera movements in a basic environment, but afterwards – together with several concept artists – I established different layers for every location. What does the city look like? What kind of materials, symbols and decorations are used in the architecture? What would be the best possible size and scale for the backgrounds, knowing that we’ll be using long takes and complex camera movements? For instance, we need to decide the length of every canal to allow the boat enough time to travel through it. Nothing was done randomly; everything needed to be well-overthought.
All animals on board have different profiles. How would you describe the profile of your main character Flow?
Zilbalodis: We get to meet the main character as being independent and self-sufficient. Like me, Flow is used to operating alone, and just like I had to learn how to work with a team, Flow is forced into a similar interaction with the other animals.
Zalcman: The central question is: what is my place as an individual in relation to a group, a society? Everyone wants to belong to a group to some extent, and therefore you sometimes have to give up certain dogmas. The cat – an independent animal by nature – understands that he has to go against his nature and cooperate with others to survive.
Zilbalodis: It was important that every single character went through some kind of journey; all are undergoing change.
What exactly is this odyssey?
Zilbalodis: The cat is on a journey of acceptance, learning to accept its two major fears: the fear of water and the fear of opening up to other creatures. The dog is basically making a journey in the opposite direction. It starts out as trustful, looking for guidance, ready to follow instructions. Throughout its journey, the dog becomes more independent and starts thinking for itself. I wanted to show the pros and cons of both thinking patterns.
Does the capybara have a profile?
Zilbalodis: It is the only one that does not undergo change. Being like a kind of mentor figure, it has already everything figured out. It’s my aspirational character: I like dogs, I think like a cat, but if I could choose, I’d prefer to be the capybara, who’s able to relax and enjoy life.
If there’s one compliment that you must have heard a billion times recently, then it’s about the unbelievable accuracy of the cat’s movements. I can refer to a scene in which the cat puts itself to sleep on the roof. It pushes out its claws, stretches, lays down its tail and finally yawns. You can’t go more cat-ish than that!
Zilbalodis: There is an endless library of cat videos available online. And we observed a swimming tiger on a group excursion to the zoo! But the credit goes to our animators and animation supervisor, Léo Silly Pélissier. With the complicated choreography of our characters, using motion capture was out of the question. Everything was animated by hand. I wanted the characters to act as true animals. Animated films tend to present animals with anthropomorphistic human behaviour, to make them relatable. I think they’re much more relatable when they behave like animals. We tend to care more for them when recognizing them as such.
Zalcman: Léo Silly Pélissier had put together a handbook with guidelines, e.g. the cat’s eyes move that way, the tail should always swipe this way,….
Although after 25 minutes in your film, a cat starts handling the rear of a boat, a lemur is packing a picnic basket… Animals suddenly exhibit human behaviour.
Zilbalodis: These actions were needed for the characters to gain agency. They’re not aimlessly wandering at sea; they make decisions, acting on their own beliefs. FLOW isn’t aiming for a photorealistic design, but even when animals are steering a boat, we researched how a cat might move under such circumstances. Animators are like actors. They question the motivation of their characters, and put their own experiences into it. We didn’t call it realism; we called it naturalism.
Zalcman: That was a budgetary, but also an artistic choice. The more realistic the designs, the faster the image ages. Our characters look like they are hand-painted. The less we lose ourselves in details, the easier it is to sense their emotions.
But you did strive for realism in the sound, didn’t you?
Zilbalodis: It’s all purely animal sounds. We used dogs to mimic dogs’ voices; often we even used the same breed – the shiba inu is done by a shiba inu, the retriever by a retriever. But we didn’t find library sounds for capybaras. Actually, they hardly talk at all. When our sound designer went to a zoo, he had to tickle the capybara’s belly to make it talk! And the sound that came out was a highly pitched yapping, basically like a chihuahua, that didn’t fit our character’s languid personality. Finally we settled with the voice of a baby camel. Cinema is full of illusions, but sometimes illusions feel more real than reality.
Sound was something you invested in, or more so… in its absence.
Zilbalodis: In absence of dialogue, the performances are profoundly created by the sound design. In terms of audio, FLOW is a rather quiet but dynamic film. Being loud all the time simply stuns the audience; it would be just noise. Now the tense, action-packed moments are much more impactful following an intimate scene, and vice versa.
Zalcman: Mixing is all about boosting or reducing. In our case, it was mainly: reducing! We were not afraid of silence. Because by giving less, the audience itself often starts to feel more. In our case, the pace is regularly slowed down to an almost contemplative atmosphere, just enough not to lose the audience’s attention.
I adored those silences!
Zilbalodis: We didn’t know if it would work out. The sound designer never before felt such a responsibility. We needed to trust the audience for not getting bored. Bigger productions might try to fill up every gap by launching a constant stream of laughter and jokes. But in smaller, independent productions, we feel more trust from the audience and the financiers.
In absence of dialogues, the rhythm is determined by the camera movements.
Zalcman: Those are Gints’ greatest strength. I have rarely seen anything like that in animation. The camera at eye level of the animals has an immersive effect – as if you take part in the action – but then he suddenly switches to a wide shot, giving you room to breathe. That alternation of viewpoints is pure acrobatics.
Zilbalodis: The long scenes are a challenge for animators. They usually work on five to ten-seconds-long shots. Our shots often went on for five minutes, demanding the animators to stay in the same headspace for a very long time, sometimes working for several months on one single shot.
You invested in sunlight! The scenes in which you see the sun reflected in the water so realistically, make it hard to believe this is animated.
Zilbalodis: You might think that working in 3D requires nothing more than pushing buttons and then the computer will do everything for you. But every scene asks for the right composition, and the right shadows falling in from the right angle. Nothing was done randomly. Of course we cheated. If you would pan the camera the other way, you would see how everything outside the frame looks broken and crooked. For every shot, I’ve been adjusting the colours, making for instance the cat a tiny bit more black or blue. Our light settings were choreographed like a live action movie. It should all look seemingly effortless, but the truth is that it was all well-conceived and prepared.
An even bigger challenge for every animator is water. And you had quite a lot of water to deal with!
Zalcman: Our results are not inferior to the water in a €80 million budget movie; the quality is comparable. Animating water is a technical matter, involving mathematical calculations. But custom plug-ins are widely accessible these days, and thanks to AI, real-time rendering and gaming technology, this will further evolve in the future.
Zilbalodis: The water was the first thing to start working at and the last thing to finish. A small puddle, a big lake or a stormy sea all ask for completely different methods and systems. The simulations with splashes and waves are extremely demanding. On one hand, it requires knowledge of physics and programming, on the other hand you need people with an artistic view on composition and colour – you’ll rarely find both skills combined in one person.
How do the characters relate to the backgrounds?
Zilbalodis: The backgrounds are more elaborate than the characters which are somewhat stylised and graphic. This disparity is as old as the art of animation. It’s the details in the backgrounds that create an immersive feeling, as if you can sense the wind on your skin and hear the leaves rustling on the trees. When you’re trying to recreate reality and you succeed for only 90%, then the result will look like a cold computerised image that is supposed to be real but isn’t. Often scenes that are less realistic and more stylized feel more relatable.
This had consequences for the labour intensity?
Zilbalodis: When writing the script for AWAY, I made a list of difficult elements to avoid at all costs, because I had to do everything by myself, and both my skills and budget were limited. The story was built around my limitations. It was pretty stupid not to do that for FLOW. I included all these complicated elements, knowing that I was going to work with a skilled team. But in the end, I still had to figure it all out and find the right people to do it.
Zalcman: For Gints, FLOW was the first time to share a project with a crew, but his collaboration with producers and animators was extremely pleasant. He was very empathetic and genuinely listened to the team’s feedback; people were willing to go the extra mile for him. Moreover, we felt very lucky with the production all the time. My experience is: sooner or later, something will go wrong, so some huge disaster is hanging over our heads. Not so! We stayed within budget and within timing. Our staff enjoyed themselves doing the job.
Maybe I shouldn’t ask you to explain the unexplainable, but… what the hell is happening on that mountain top?
Zilbalodis: Explaining this scene is like a comedian explaining why a joke is funny. But I can tell you how I came up with it… The cat is always looking for a way to escape from problems, as cats tend to do. Like Flow, climbing up on the roof, waiting for the flood to stop, or climbing up the mast until the quarrelling is over. When reaching those high cliffs, this seems like the ultimate place to escape. But the cat and its companion climb too high – metaphorically speaking – and get detached from reality. They escape their problems but also lose touch with the world; they are being lost in this void. The cat’s companion has given up on itself, it has lost its feeling of belonging, and it doesn’t want Flow to make the same mistakes. Therefore it begs the cat to go down and face reality with all its problems and adversities. That scene helped me to understand the characters’ feelings and their place in life.
What should we know about Take Five’s profile?
Zalcman: The company has been around for about 15 years. Initially, we were mostly doing short films and documentaries. Until we understood that animation is just another technique to tell a story. Whether it is the most appropriate technique is often a matter of gut feeling. We produced films by Bruno Tondeur, Hannah Letaïf, Anca Damian… Our feature-length animation SIROCCO AND THE KINGDOM OF THE WIND by Benoit Chieux was a great experience, and with FLOW we are suddenly playing one level higher; bigger projects now come knocking on our door. Just wait until FLOW wins that Oscar!
Interview conducted by Gert Hermans for CEE Animation.
