Flow, the latvian animated picture leaves the public speechless without saying one single word, including the Academy Awards.

The latvian gem

Without one single word, Flow (2024) can take you on a boat trip of emotions. The animated picture with no lines tells the story of a solitary and independent black cat that has to learn how to live among other animals – a dog, a capybara, a lemur and a bird – as they refuge themselves from the flood in a small boat.  

Gints Zilbalodis, the latvian and 29 year-old director of the movie, explains that the narrative follows the cat overcoming its fear of working among other people and how it relates to the process of making the film itself. Flow is the first project in which Zilbalodis has worked with a team and not by himself. 

The latvian movie has conquered not only the heart of the public achieving 98% of approval from the Rotten Tomatoes, but also the Academia and has already won more than 10 prizes, among them the Golden Globe of Best Animated Feature. Besides that, the animation is the first-ever latvian nominee for Best Animated Feature Film and Best International Feature Film by the Academy Awards. The 97th ceremony will take place next Sunday, March 2nd. 

“The film brings up themes very sensitives such as death and the climate change matter”, affirmed the spectator Laura Marescotti, 64.  

Independent production

The independent production of Flow had to face some financial challenges and was created with a very short budget and a latvian, french and belgium teams as Zilbalodis mentioned in one of his interviews. Even with difficulties, the picture achieved unprecedented positions and acknowledgement in the cinema field, being the first-ever latvian piece to be nominated in the Academy Awards. 

This achievement becomes even more unique analysing the techniques used in the production. In an interview for the Festival of Cannes, one of the most respected cinema festivals, Zilbalodis describes his working method on which, unlike traditional animated films, the team didn’t use storyboards. Instead he first created the 3D scenario where he could explore possibilities with the characters, once the movie presented many action scenes with camera movements, for example, the chasing takes between the cat and the dog. 

Universal non-language

None of  Zilbalodis’ movies have lines and Flow wouldn’t be different. “I am really attracted to telling stories visually and also using sounds and  music”, he said in an interview about the behind the scenes. Without the words itself, the 90 minute-long film can appear to be a boring experience, but with the support of the soundtrack and the colourful takes Flow catches your attention from the beginning till the end. 

The latvian director also invites the audience to participate in the story and try to understand some points of the plot that were not clear, such as where are the humans, how did the flood start. “I don’t like to spoon feed the audience and explain everything”. 

The only sounds heard while watching the film, besides the soundtrack, are the animal expressions. Moreover, differently than most of the animated pieces with animals, the sounds lay only on natural noises without any human interference, except for the capybara. Sofía Gómez de Kerpel, a student of Entertainment Business Management, said that the experience of watching an animation without dialogues gives the public the opportunity to undersand the characters’ emotions in a different way. “The fact that there were no lines and the animals didn’t say anything with words, they said everything with their body language and sounds. Even the ‘meows’ transmitted emotion”. Therefore, without a language barrier, the latvian animated picture managed to transmit this sensibility in a universal language of ‘meows’.

_{Featured image: Flow}