Many animated features and “live-action” CG remakes of hand-drawn films strive for realism, but “Flow” director Gints Zilbalodis had a different goal while creating the animal antics of his double Oscar nominee. Instead, it’s naturalism — which represents the world mostly as we see it but leaves room for emotional flourishes to transform a landscape or character design — that Zilbalodis and his animation team worked toward.
Focused on a cat, who reluctantly ends up in the same boat as a set of other animals amid a flooded world with no human in sight, “Flow” gives us tantalizing clues as to what the wider story is. Yet it never fully reveals what’s going on or what the characters are trying to communicate to each other — it’s wrong to call this a silent film, but it is dialogue-free, discounting all the cute cat and dog and lemur sounds our animal companions make. So it made sense to Zilbalodis that the animation would ground us in reality, while subtly changing to foreground emotional storytelling work.
“ I wanted it to feel immersive so the world is quite detailed, but it’s not hyper-realistic — not just with the look, but also with the movement of the characters,” Zilbalodis told IndieWire on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “We studied real images of nature, but we’re interpreting [them], and we only put detail where it’s really necessary, which is another tool for us to guide the audience.”
This applies not just to the strange statues and alluring ruins that the film’s Cat strides through on his quest to stay dry, but character design as well. “I think the characters are less detailed than the environments because I think that makes them more appealing and allows us to push the designs a little bit more to have the emotions be more clear and direct,” Zilbalodis said. “The audience can project their own experiences onto the characters. They’re filling the gaps of the design.”
Part of creating an evocative design is leaving artifacts of a “human” touch, even when animators are working on the computer. Spaces sometimes have visible brush strokes, and environments are designed to be tactile not in the sense that the audience feels like we can touch them, but in the sense that everything looks like it was made by a human hand. That’s in large part because every asset was made by a human hand.
“We can’t take some ready-made stuff from some library or ask an artist to make something realistic. That’s very easy to tell them to make something that’s very objective, but when you have a more abstract or stylized style, then everything needs to be designed and to be unified with the rest of the world,” Zilbalodis said.
A light, and particularly painterly, animation style is part of what Zilbalodis uses to draw the viewer in, but he also really leans on camerawork to guide us through the cat’s perspective, particularly some ambitious long takes. But this meant that Zilbalodis couldn’t rely on a mainstay of animated storytelling.
“We don’t use storyboards because of the long takes. It’s impossible to draw all the perspective changes,” Zilbalodis said. “I’m also not really good at drawing. I can draw, but I’m very slow; so instead of storyboards, I basically start with the animatic, or it could be called previz, and I create a rough version of the environment.”
Zilbalodis used that digital environment, which comes pre-lit with some basic effects, to basically run a virtual location scout and figure out camera placement and movement for each shot. And while “Flow” is absolutely a team effort by a crew of Latvian and French animators, Zilbalodis wanted to see the light and adjust the environment for himself.
“It is important to not separate the lighting from the camera placement… I heard that on bigger productions, there are separate people doing these things, but I can’t imagine separating these,” Zilbalodis said. “The way the camera moves, it can convey curiosity. It can convey fear. And for the most part, it’s the point of view of the cat. It’s very subjective. [And] with the long takes, the camera is moving a lot, so there’s editing within the shot. It’s like in-camera editing basically and it needs to be in sync with the music. It needs to tell the story, but it’s also very emotional.”
The work, however emotional or fun it is, is also very open-source. Zilbalodis and his team used Blender, a 3D animation software available for anyone to download and for which countless YouTube tutorials exist. Which was important, as Zilbalodis and especially his Latvian crew were learning and leveling up on the job.
“It’s great that it’s free, because our budget was fairly modest, which really helped to save some resources, but, what’s great also about Blender [is] you can have this real-time rendering [and] this really helps with the intuitiveness of it,” Zilbalodis said. “I learned [Blender] while making this film. I hadn’t used it before and it’s really quick to learn. Our animations, most of them hadn’t used it and it took them only like a week to learn.”
There’s a little bit of life imitating art imitative life in the making of “Flow.” Zilbalodis identifies with the cat — a creature more comfortable working alone but who needs to band together with a team. All the animals need to figure out challenges together in order to thrive. But whether it’s through the art style, camera movement, or music (and Zilbalodis composed over eight hours himself before working alongside Rihards Zalupe to create the film’s score), “Flow” builds a naturalistic world that leaves room for our feelings and the adventures we might have with them.
“It’s something that I feel like audiences are looking for — realism in [animation] has already been reached and people, I think, are getting bored of that and audiences are really embracing different types of looks for films. Now it’s also being accepted in bigger, more mainstream films, but I think in the smaller, independent field, the boundaries are pushed a lot further,” Zilbalodis said.
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