The story behind Flow, a dreamy arthouse animation about the climate crisis

If there are adequate words to describe the overwhelming, hypnotic power of Flow, they certainly aren’t contained within the film. An animated, dialogue-free thriller from the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis, Flow contains zero human beings, only the manmade destruction they left behind. Beating The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2 to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, Zilbalodis’s enigmatic fantasy follows a cat during an unexplained environmental disaster. After surviving a stampede of deer, the frightened feline heads towards the heavens as relentless flooding proves increasingly perilous, the water knocking over trees until they’re no longer visible.

Going down a storm at Cannes and then the Oscars, Flow is ultimately a piece of arthouse cinema – or Noah’s Ark-house cinema – even if its premise sounds like it could be from the Pixar brain trust. Somewhat reluctantly, the cat befriends other creatures on its quest to stay afloat amidst danger: a Golden Labrador who slowly undoes dog stereotypes; a lemur whose attachment to objects is a jab at capitalism; an injured crane unable to fly; and a capybara seemingly along for the ride. Due to the absence of dialogue and people, there’s no curse words or human nudity, meaning that the Latvian film will likely mesmerise kids, adults, and pets alike.

While audiences, myself included, have largely perceived Flow to be a wake-up call about global warming, Zilbalodis tells me that the story was inspired by his own worrisome nature. “I’m an anxious person,” says the 30-year-old director. “I try to live with it. The film shows that you can’t just overcome your fears and find that your life is perfect. Even though we have climate change motifs, it could be about any kind of catastrophe, whether it’s war or something more personal like starting a new life. The cat is constantly climbing up things to escape its world. Maybe the cat escapes bad things, but it also escapes good things. It becomes detached from reality. The cat has to climb back down to face those fears and leave its comfort zone.”

The idea for Flow dates back to Aqua, an animated short Zilbalodis made at the age of 15 about a cat who’s afraid of water. Since then, Zilbalodis has only directed animated features without any dialogue. A one-man film about an anonymous figure lost on an island, 2019’s Away credits Zilbalodis as everything from writer and director to the editor and music composer. On Flow, though, he assembled a production crew for a more ambitious project requiring a larger budget. He considers the film to be a meta reflection on how he, like the cat, had to learn about teamwork, albeit for animating a natural disaster rather than surviving a real one.

“The cat working with others was a deliberate way of putting my anxiety into the film,” says Zilbalodis. “I used to work just by myself, and for the first time I had to articulate my thoughts to others. Before, if I had an idea, I could just make it. But now I had to explain it. It forces you to be more precise. You can’t put things in for no reason. You’re challenged and questioned. But I was afraid of it being too polished. I wanted it to have ambiguity and mystery. On a bigger team, sometimes you can lose that personal aspect and those imperfections. I would have to ask the team to trust me that it would work.”

Instead of striving for photorealism, Flow takes on a more old-school approach to animation that has been compared by critics to a PlayStation 2 aesthetic. Citing indies like Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian as influences when he was younger, Zilbalodis believes that Flow emulates the feeling of exploring a new environment as a gamer. The film utilises wide-angle lenses for lengthy, unbroken takes that show both the character and the background within the same frame.

“I wasn’t interested in conventional coverage where you have close-ups and wide shots,” says Zilbalodis. “I think it’s more interesting to be actively participating in the storytelling. I like putting clues in the background. I like being expressive with the camera. In videogames, you have environmental storytelling where you’re finding clues, and putting them together. That’s more interesting than having a narrator giving you exposition. Without dialogue, you have to guide where the audience is looking and use tools that are similar to videogames, like this big structure in the distance which you can see from anywhere.”

Zilbalodis is referring to the towers of a half-submerged city that the creatures attempt to reach by boat. Even within this postapocalyptic scenario, Flow is still redolent of live-action filmmaking, a quirk related to how Zilbalodis planned out the camera angles. “I made the environments and would explore it with a virtual camera, almost like location-scouting,” he explains. “Some artists can imagine the scene in their head. I don’t have this ability. I need to discover it. Once I find the shot with the virtual camera, it can be spontaneous and improvised. I spent a year and a half figuring out the camera, the blocking, the mise-en-scène. The camera is moving and the characters are moving. It’s a dance between them.”

By taking home the trophy for Best International Film at the Oscars, Flow became the first Latvian film to win an Oscar, prompting Conon O’Brien to quip at the ceremony, “Your move, Estonia.” However, Flow’s success was also a victory for independent cinema: it cost under $4 million, whereas its competitor Inside Out 2 had a budget of $200 million. Above all, Flow is dazzling viewers around the world, its wordless action uniting cinemagoers in their fears over climate change. In an essay for Vulture, Uncut Gems co-director Benny Safdie concluded, “Everybody should see this movie.”

Even if Zilbalodis is keen to stress that Flow is about more than global warming, he also notes that there’s a boat in the tree, and buildings have been abandoned. “I left clues for the audience to figure out why we don’t see humans in the story,” he says. “It suggests there was a flood before, and there might be a flood later. The humans escaped and left these animals to fend for themselves.”

He continues, “I can imagine it happening in real life as well, that humans would be safe but the animals would not be safe. Seeing this kind of story from an animal’s point of view can be a lot more emotional and impactful. I think we care more about animals than humans.”

Flow is out in UK cinemas today.