Flow is a gorgeous animated Noah’s Ark tale-of-sorts that bobs into cinemas like a message in a bottle. The brainchild of Gints Zilbalodis, a 30-year-old Latvian film-maker, it’s about an unnamed house cat cast adrift on a sailboat alongside a capybara and a ring-tailed lemur. The world has flooded; one disaster follows another. The animals on the boat have to help one another or die. Flow contains no human life and not one line of actual dialogue. Despite this, it is eloquent and humane and almost unbearably tense.
Animators, says Zilbalodis, are a little like cats, in that they tend to be self-sufficient, antisocial and have to be coaxed into joining a team. Flow’s production involved Zilbalodis abandoning his desk to oversee a small crew of artists. He had to learn how to delegate, collaborate and risk having his ideas challenged and shot down. The finished film, therefore, is almost a parable of its own making; a comment on all those behind-the-scenes negotiations. It’s a salute to the loners who need to pool their resources, and the endangered beasts on the margins that have to adapt to survive.
Flow, though, has managed more than mere survival. It’s a phenomenon, a breakout hit; a hand-tooled, small-scale production that speaks to the multiplex and the arthouse alike. At last weekend’s Academy Awards, Zilbalodis’s labour-of-love drama scooped the Oscar for best animated feature, the first independent production to do so, beating out the likes of Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot. The picture (which was also nominated in the best international film category) may count as a trailblazer of sorts, part of a new breed, because it was recognised on the animated Oscar shortlist alongside Adam Elliot’s mordant Memoir of a Snail and Nina Gantz’s eerie short Wander to Wonder. Each of these pictures is nuanced, distinctive and strange. Each was produced for next to no money. Independent animation used to be seen as an atomised backwater. Now it’s emerged from the shadows to trouble the mainstream.
If there exists such a thing as an animation community, it lives a nomadic existence on the European film festival circuit. That’s where the artists tend to congregate, Zilbalodis says. Festivals were his film school, or possibly his watering holes. “But as a community it’s very fractured,” he adds. “People live in their own niche bubbles and don’t interact much. They definitely don’t follow any formula. If you look at the big animation studios, there is an established system, a general understanding of the way things are done. But independent animations are made by just a few people. There is no industry standard, so you can tell whatever story you like in whatever style that you like.”
That variety is reflected at every festival, he adds. “One film will have a conventional narrative and the next will be abstract. One will be for young kids and the next will be very dark and adults-only. Everyone uses different tools, different software or different puppets. The possibilities are infinite.”
Zilbalodis created Flow on Blender, an open-source software that enabled him to animate the animals as CGI wireframe models and paint in his backgrounds of forested hills and drowned cities. Dutch-born Nina Gantz, by contrast, is more old-school. Her Bafta-winning Wander to Wonder uses stop-motion puppetry to resuscitate the survivors of an old children’s TV show. These puppets live on in the studio after the aged presenter has died, recording forlorn updates for the fans who have long since grown up and moved on. As with Flow, it’s a film that reflects on its own existence, celebrating the dying art of physical media while eerily subverting it too.
Wander to Wonder clocks in at under 14 minutes. But the fact it exists at all is a miracle, Gantz says. “There were so many disasters along the way. The puzzle of funding. One of the companies went bankrupt. The puppets weren’t done on time. There were so many moments when I almost dropped the whole thing. But I loved the world we were creating. That’s what kept me going, I think.”
The film took about eight years to complete. That’s a lot of time spent on 14 minutes of puppetry and raises a crass and obvious question. Just how viable is a career in independent animation?
“Not viable!” says Gantz. The very idea makes her laugh. “It’s not viable at all. You do it for the love of the craft and the film and you try not to think about all the rest. And probably you have to be a little bit insane.”
I put the same question to the Australian animator Adam Elliot, who spent a similar amount of time making Memoir of a Snail. “It’s barely viable,” he says. “I haven’t starved yet, but I’ve come close. Luckily I draw and sell my artwork as a way of keeping myself alive between productions. Also I’m a product of government funding in Australia. That means I get money to write and develop. It would be different if I were trying to make films in America. I’d have to be making family-friendly children’s entertainment.” He shrugs. “So as an auteur it’s a struggle. And it’s not getting any easier.”
Elliot has been around for donkey’s years. He won the best animated short film Oscar for 2003’s Harvie Krumpet and describes his style as “100% traditional”. His bonfires are made with orange cellophane and his cigarette smoke with cotton wool. Every one of his characters is a plasticine model, dressed up for action and manipulated gently by hand.
“When I was starting out, I was told I was pursuing a dying art form,” he says. “That was 29 years ago. Computer animation had just started and was going to take over the world. And it sort of has. We’re drowning in digital culture and CGI animation. But I think the arrival of AI has brought a greater appreciation of hand-crafted art forms, whether it’s knitting or breadmaking or stop-motion animation. It’s an egalitarian art form because you can shoot a film on your phone. But stop-motion also has a magical quality that other animation doesn’t. When the audience is able to see the thumbprint on the clay, they know they’re looking at something tangible, tactile and real.”
That personal touch imprints every frame of Memoir of a Snail, a tragicomic coming-of-age tale that took top prize at the 2024 London film festival (the first stop-motion picture to do so). Animation, Elliot says, is a medium, not a genre. Flow, Memoir of a Snail and Wander to Wonder are all very different movies. But their independent nature filters through to their stories. They’re more complex and less costly than most mainstream animations.
Memoir of a Snail was made for about £3.5m. Flow’s budget was £3m. Compare that with the bill for the average studio behemoth. “Inside Out 2 cost $200m,” says Elliot. “You look at me with Memoir and Gints with Flow – our budgets are what those people spend on catering. So I’m trying to talk to the big studios – Netflix, Amazon, DreamWorks – and say, ‘Come on, guys, be more generous. Carve out a little slice of these budgets and invest in some independent auteurs.’” It makes economic sense: a number of big animations (Wish, Elemental) have recently sputtered at the box office. “The old formula isn’t working. Hollywood is really struggling with animation. So it needs to transition. Things have to change.”
The creatures on the boat (the cat, the capybara and the ring-tailed lemur) have simple needs: food, shelter, dry land. The three independent animators (Zilbalodis, Gantz, Elliot) aren’t asking for a whole lot more. They’d like sound infrastructure and a better model of distribution. Extra money would allow them to develop, crew and shoot their films more quickly. But a lifetime of solitude is a hard habit to shake and too much interference risks muddying the finished film.
“I know all the stories about independent film-makers who go and make something huge,” Zilbalodis says, “and more often than not they get overwhelmed. The system doesn’t allow them to express or say what they want.”
A century ago, an independent animator named Walt Disney embarked on a career that would carry him from the drawing board to global dominance; from 1928’s Steamboat Willie to studios and theme parks and a company that is valued at about £165bn. So there is a precedent here and a possible path to glory, should Zilbalodis choose to take it.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” he says ruefully. “But I promise you that is never going to happen. I’m not going to build a business. I don’t know what I’d do with big success. I don’t have any hobbies. I sleep and I eat and I sit at my desk. Anything more would only be a distraction.”
Flow is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 21 March, in Australia on 20 March and is available to stream in the US. Memoir of a Snail is in cinemas now in the UK and Ireland and available to stream in Australia and the US. Wander to Wonder isn’t currently available in the UK but is in US cinemas along with the rest of the Oscar-nominated short films – details here
