Gints Zilbalodis on Oscar-winning animation Flow

Since the BAFTA and Oscar-nominated animation Flow first premiered at Cannes last May, Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis has answered questions from likely hundreds of journalists and fellow filmmakers. On the Monday that we meet in person, he’s fresh off a grilling from the toughest audience around: kids given access to microphones.

“We had two screenings: one was mostly children, one was mostly adults,” Zilbalodis says of his weekend activities. “It seems to work for both. Our intention was to make a film that’s for children but also for adults. Maybe it's a bit more philosophical and there’s a different visual language than most children's films, but I think it's easy to follow for kids. It’s not too abstract for them. But I was just making the film I wanted to see and hoped that it would resonate with others.”

Told completely free of dialogue (unless you count the noises of its animal stars), Flow is set in an unspecified place where mankind seems to have vanished; empty cabins and statues being some of the lone suggestions that humans were ever there at all. Wandering the forest, a wee cat (who we’ll call Cat) lives a solitary existence. But when its home is devastated by a great flood, Cat seeks refuge on a boat that becomes populated by different species, including a dog, a lemur and a capybara. As further perils push this motley crew towards mystical overflowed landscapes, they must team up to navigate this new world.

Flow is an independent production made using the free, open-source software Blender; Zilbalodis’ previous animated feature, Away, was similarly relatively lo-fi in using the computer program Maya. Back in 2012, he produced Aqua, a short film about a cat overcoming its fear of water, which served as the initial starting point for Flow. “I wanted to focus more on the cat's fear of other animals or fear of working together,” Zilbalodis says of the feature expansion, “because I thought that I would be making this film with a team and I had all these anxieties. I thought I should put these feelings in the film itself. I would have no distance; it would be a very raw emotion for me. And I think it's important to tell personal stories. If [viewers] sense that a filmmaker is really invested, it's something special for them.”

In lieu of dialogue found in most animated films aimed at all-ages audiences, so much of the character in Flow is down to the incredible sound design, long unbroken takes and subtle details in the animation. With Cat especially, it’s all about its eyes and sometimes barely perceptible noises. “We would record all the animals and my sound designer would record his cat as well, who's very shy when it's being recorded,” Zilbalodis says of his unwitting voice cast.

“We had to hide the microphone in his house to record the cat secretly,” he adds. “We recorded a capybara as well, but capybaras don't really speak. They’re very quiet, so we had to tickle the capybara to make a sound, but the sound didn't fit this character at all. It was a high-pitched, squeaky voice and we needed something calmer and reassuring, so we looked for other animals to voice the capybara. After a long search, we ended up with a baby camel. All the other animals have their voice; each of the dogs is voiced by their specific breeds. Sometimes in cinema, you need to cheat in some ways because if you do everything exactly as real life, it can be distracting and even less believable than if you do some cheating.”

Speaking of cheating, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not catching Flow during its theatrical run, as its dialogue-free visual storytelling encourages and rewards locked-in engagement. “It’s important to have the audience be active,” the soft-spoken filmmaker tells me. “Even if audiences think they don't want to work, I think they enjoy working for the film. They enjoy putting effort into the film because then it becomes something that you're not just passively absorbing. This is something where you have to pay attention; that's why I think it really works much better in the cinema. You can't just do dinner or dishes at the same time.

“With a lot of TV series nowadays, especially, you can just listen to the audio, and the camera or editing is so direct. It's [only] functional and it just tells you this happens and then that happens, which doesn't have any emotion. I wanted to do the opposite where you create an immersive experience. Those are my favourite films… where there's just something more poetic or engaging visually. I might forget the dialogue, I might forget the story, but I tend to remember the feeling I had watching the images.”

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Flow won Best Animated Feature at this year's Oscars and is released 21 Mar by Curzon