By: Kat Littfin

Local Editor

Earlier this month, many were surprised when the Academy Awards announced the selection of Flow, a low-budget Latvian animation about a cat’s journey with its animal friends, for Best Animated Feature. The movie beat front-runners Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot to become Latvia’s first film to win an Academy Award. A feature film with an inspiring production process, important themes, and global acclaim, Flow is a must-watch for people of all ages.

Directed by Gints Zibalodis, Flow,the English translation of the Latvian title Straume, follows the journey of a solitary and skittish black cat in a post-apocalyptic society as a sudden flood displaces the cat and other animals. As the cat’s fear of water sends it searching for refuge to higher ground, an affable capybara, who happens to be sailing a boat, rescues the cat just before the flood engulfs it. Along their journey, a troop of other assorted animals join the pair, including a steadfastly loyal golden retriever, a wise and assertive secretary bird, a hoarding lemur, and a whale who saves the cat from drowning and becomes an important character at the end of the movie. The animals face many challenges as the water continues to rise and destroy their habitats and the habitats of less friendly animals. By the end of the movie, the flood subsides, and while the land animals can return to their habitats and thrive, marine animals, including the friendly whale, perish.

Zibalodis began the production of Flow in 2019, using the free animation software Blender. Flow’s production was impressively inexpensive in comparison to other animations nominated for Best Animated Feature, as Zibalodis did much of the work for the film himself, only helped by a small team and later larger companies for post-production. Matiss Kanza aided Zilbalodis in writing for Flow, and companies Take Five and Sacre Bleu helped with animation and sound engineering starting in 2022. The movie features no dialogue but instead a cacophony of animal noises and an instrumental soundtrack composed by Zibalodis and Rihards Zalupe. The sound engineer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas recorded the sounds of his cat Miut and animals at the zoo. For some of the animals, Coic-Gallas and Zibaldonis had to be more creative, using a camel for the sounds of the capybara and a pitched-down tiger for the sounds of the whale. Impressively, the animation was not storyboarded, and it features no deleted scenes.

Though outwardly the animation seems surface-level, the story explores deeper themes and symbols. A significant theme illustrated in the film is fear and the support of friendship. The cat must overcome its fear of water in many instances, but often its fear becomes paralyzing. In the end, only the cat’s animal friends can save it. In an interview, Zibaldoni stated, “There are certain things we can change about ourselves… but there’s still some anxieties we feel… I wanted to show how the cat does improve on its fears, but it still has these deep down…And I wanted to show how that’s okay and maybe there’s others who can support that.” Furthermore, the film touches upon environmentalism as the extreme shifts in weather and rising sea levels mirror the global warming observed today, and the film features many shots of natural beauty.

Flow has been wildly successful globally, especially for a Latvian film. The animation was so popular that Latvia erected a statue of the cat in its capital city, Riga. The film debuted at the famed Cannes Film Festival, where it received high praise before winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. If you are curious about this highly acclaimed animation that merited a statue in a nation’s capital, watch Flow, available for streaming on HBO Max.

(Sources: Wikipedia, Animation Scoop)