Sylvia Shedden | Treasurer NIFSS | March 5, 2025
I was thrilled that NIFSS chose to show “Flow” as one its movies during this first season and that it was nominated for an animated feature Academy Award. While Latvia is known for its hockey teams, it is not known for its cinematography. It was a wonderful surprise, right after the seeing movie, to find it had won the Academy Award! Latvians the world over have been celebrating all week.
The animation was outstanding, especially knowing that the budget for the movie was only $3.7M compared to at least one of the other animated movies nominated for the Award which spent $200M in production. The animation was developed using open-source software that is available to anyone.
The setting of the story is open to many interpretations – is it after an apocalypse that has flooded the world many years in the future? There are no humans to be seen, but presumably they were the builders of the derelict buildings and had, of course, left their garbage behind. Have the humans finally killed each other off leaving the animals to inherit the planet? Is the setting perhaps another planet in a universe far away? Is it a new take on the theme of Noah’s Ark?
The five key animal characters are brilliant. The voices of the cat, lemur, golden retriever, and secretary bird are real while the voice of a baby camel was used for the capybara. There were no words in the film and as director Gints Zilbaldis explained, some emotions can’t be expressed in words but a film without words can transcend cultural boundaries.
The behaviours of the cat and dogs were entirely consistent with what we know of them. I loved the bits of humour, such as the lemur becoming obsessed with an old mirror he has found. When he was making faces into the mirror, the light of the mirror reflected on the side of the boat creating a moving dot that was then chased by the cat (of course!). Near the end, the dogs that had joined the group were helping to rescue the other animals, but as soon as they saw a rabbit, they took off to chase it instead!
And what is the message of the film? Latvian folklore is filled with stories about the wisdom of animals, who often whisper good advice to humans. The animals on the boat in this movie found ways to work together to feed and save each other without giving up their inherent natures. At the Academy Award presentation, Zilbaldis commented that we are all in the same boat and must find ways to overcome our differences and work together