Flow, In the Words of Co-Writer and Producer Matīss Kaža

“Our goal was to make you feel like you are this cat,” said Matīss Kaža, co-screenwriter/producer of Flow, before a showing of the animated film at my college this past Wednesday. Flow—also known as Straume in its native Latvian—recently won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and became the most-viewed film in Latvian history. It was produced on a budget of just $3.7 million by a startlingly small team, with many of the filmmakers (Kaža included) juggling several roles at once.

Before Flow was shown to our unusually-crowded lecture hall, Kaža (who had swapped his red carpet tux for an unassuming gray sweatshirt) gave a short introduction where he discussed the origin of the film and its director, Gints Zilbalodis: “This movie comes from the small country of Latvia in the Baltics, and it was made by a filmmaker who was used to being an author, but not a director. Gints Zilbalodis used to work all by himself. Every film up to Flow, he was the only person in the credits.”

Kaža described Zilbalodis as a stark individualist who decided he needed help making Flow after realizing the true scope of the project. “Much like the film is about an individualistic cat who finds itself on a boat with other animals, so did the director,” said Kaža.

The following hour and a half was as tense and gripping as it was lush, serene, and ruminative. Flow is a movie that thrives on its own subjectivity: there is no dialogue, no overly-anthropomorphized characters, and no humans in sight. Kaža described it as a fantasy movie, although the fantastical aspects mostly fill out the verdant background of an undeniably genuine story. The animation is intricate, wild, and distinctive, and the camera acts as a character in its own right: sometimes noticing the action a frame late and scrambling to pan over, imbuing the stakes with documentary-level realism. There is something charmingly video-game-esque about the landscapes and characters in Flow. Its style evokes the cartoonish cel-shading of video games like Breath of the Wild, although the atmosphere of Flow hovers somewhere between this game’s somber post-apocalyptic tone and the sunny buoyancy of any Studio Ghibli flick.

Flow follows a cat and its four companions—all unnamed, as naming animals is a human convention that the filmmakers wished to avoid imposing on their characters, according to Kaža—as they navigate a newly-flooded world on a rickety boat. The flood forces this unlikely ensemble (which includes a lemur, capybara, dog, and an African secretarybird) to reckon with their differences in order to survive. This simple premise belies the complex themes of belonging, sacrifice, and loss grappled with throughout the story.

We were a vocal audience; the showing was punctuated by our gasps, laughter, and a generous helping of awws. By the end of the showing, there were very few dry eyes in the room, and the film received a lengthy standing ovation. There was no doubt about it: Flow had succeeded in making us feel like we were cats. When Kaža retook the stage for the Q&A segment, almost a dozen hands immediately shot up.

Kaža first described the process of writing the screenplay, a task that was both unconventional and primarily undertaken for funding reasons; an illustrative screenplay, with pictures from the film’s animatic, was created for the initial funding application. “We actually worked more on Google Sheets than we did writing anything,” said Kaža. “The only reason we actually needed a script was for funding purposes. We didn’t really need it for ourselves. After we finished the final version of the script, Gints never read it. He made the whole thing off of memory. That gave way to improvisation and also to forgetting unnecessary things that were in the script, but were not needed for the final film.”

Funding was especially difficult to secure for Flow due to the film’s ambiguity. Kaža specifically named Germany as one of the biggest skeptics: “Germany basically didn’t fund this movie. We tried applying for television and public funds, but they said, ‘Well, what is this movie for? Is it for kids? Is it for adults? How is it going to keep people’s attention?’” Kaža expressed frustration that independent animated films like Flow would remain undiscovered due to the type of cynical thinking perpetuated by funding bodies and distributors.

Zilbalodis had already invented the concept and main structure of Flow before Kaža became involved. “We knew each other from before. I had given him comments on his first feature film Away. He invited me on as a co-writer at first,” said Kaža. “He did not trust me to produce the film, because I hadn’t produced an animated film at the time.” Zilbalodis and Kaža were able to strike a good working balance partially because they thought quite differently from one another: “He found my comments worthwhile because I did not think exactly like him. If you have somebody who thinks differently, you might view what you’ve written from an unexpected perspective.”

Since Flow contains no dialogue, the screenplay was somewhat literary in nature; the page count was around 35, according to Kaža. This is unusually short for a film with Flow’s runtime, but Kaža explained that certain written actions—“cat swims,” for example—could take up minutes of screentime. He personally drew inspiration from Haiku poetry when writing: “In Haiku poetry, you describe the meaning of the situation through audio-visual means without giving it away directly. You create an atmosphere purely through describing how a worm pops out of the dirt, or something like that.”

After completing the screenplay, Kaža and Zilbalodis realized that the film would need to be an international co-production between several countries; these countries ended up being Latvia, France, and Belgium. “It couldn’t just be Latvia, because in Latvia we don’t have enough 3D animators to pull off a project like this, specifically for character animation,” said Kaža. “We could do the rest of the stuff in Latvia. The music and the concept—that we could do.”

Flow’s score was created by Zilbalodis and Rihards Zaļupe, who worked as co-composers. “[Zilbalodis was a] co-composer because he does not have any musical education, per se. He cannot read notes, but he can compose on Logic and iPad software. He composed hours and hours of musical themes which we could then draw upon when making the animatic, and even before that, when writing the script,” said Kaža.

Kaža explained that the French producer Ron Dyens was “completely amazed” by Zilbalodis’ previous film Away and already wanted to work with him, which brought in French funding for the film. The character animations were done by a French animation team. “During this animation process, I was woken up every morning by 17 messages saying ‘bonjour’ on Slack,” laughed Kaža. “For some reason, the French animation team had to say hello to each other every morning.”

The rest of the core crew was Latvian, and each member came from a disparate background. Kaža’s background was in documentary and live action film, but some of his teammates had more unusual origins: “The guy who did the water effects, he used to do VR medical simulations, like surgery simulators. The girl who did the flowers and the greenery, she’s a theater stage designer, and she didn’t know Blender before.”

Flow was produced on the free, open-source 3D computer graphics software Blender. It was Zilbalodis’ first time making a film with Blender, and the software was part of the reason why the film’s budget could be so low. “In this software, the director built an early version of the sets and then worked like a cinematographer would have on a real set: looking for the shots, looking for the placement of the characters, the prompts, and the interactions,” said Kaža. “A lot of [the crew] were taught this software when they started. They watched a lot of tutorials by themselves, and then Gints came in with his notes.”

“We had some teenagers on the team,” said Kaža, seeming to thoroughly enjoy describing his coworkers to the room. “We had this 16-year-old who’s some Blender prodigy, who could resolve all the technical issues that we had. We had a guy who had a crazy scientist look—he’s a teacher at one of the Latvian art schools, and he teaches environmental design. I think that’s also part of the reason why this worked so well. They all had this similar circle of knowledge when it came to Blender and different aspects of the animation process, but then very separate kinds of contexts and skills.”

Production began during the COVID-19 pandemic. The total number of people who worked on Flow was around 50, but there were only 2 to 4 people in the studio at a time; including the filmmakers’ dogs, whose names appear in the credits. In choosing the species of animals for the film, the filmmakers considered two aspects: one was the range of character archetypes, which they were able to match by looking at the temperaments of various animals (they wanted an amicable and friendly character, for example, and chose the capybara because of its real-world docility). The other was the silhouettes, which they wanted to be distinct from one another.

The cat and dog in the film were inspired by Zilbalodis’ real pets, while the lemur was inspired by a woman Kaža knew from college. “When I was a sophomore in college at NYU, I made this documentary about the most obsessive theater-goer in the world. She was in her 70s at that point, now she’s in her 80s. She basically tries to scam her way to any theater she can every night. She also hoards things at home. She has playbills from 1975 just stacked in her apartment. I took certain aspects from her personality and integrated them into the way the lemur behaves.”

Kaža said the filmmakers intentionally avoided placing the film in a particular social, political, or historical context. There are signs of humanity throughout the entire movie—an abandoned house where the cat sleeps in the opening scenes, ruined cities, amphitheaters, boats—but no indication as to what kind of calamity befell us. “You could watch this movie in 20 years and it would probably resonate similarly, because there is no link to a specific time or a specific history,” said Kaža.

This subjectivity is present in the film’s story as well. Kaža expressed a certain disdain for stories that employ overly-heavy exposition. “I think there’s so much commercial art that spoon-feeds you with: ‘This is the way to interpret this scene. This is what really happens in this situation.’ There’s something nice about ambiguity. It opens up your imagination and lets you participate in the co-creation of this world.” Kaža cited the reason for why Flow was able to keep its subjectivity as the lack of an executive committee that would interfere with the final cut.

It follows, then, that Kaža retained an air of mystery when answering questions pertaining to the specific morals of Flow. What he did offer, however, was that each character was motivated by a desire for belonging. “Each of them wants to belong in some form of society, and I think that’s what unifies all of the characters. Belonging sometimes comes with certain rules. There are a lot of complicated relationships in the film dealing with communities and with the individual.”

The filmmakers believed that the best way to explore these deeply human themes was, ironically, not to anthropomorphize the animals too much. “The different animals, of course, are inspired by humanistic characters. You can recognize one of your friends in the snoring capybara, and you can recognize someone else, perhaps, in the cat. There is this paradox: we’re trying not to anthropomorphize these animals, so we portray their behavior naturalistically. But we can also say a lot about how humans act in different situations, whether as a part of a crowd or as individuals.”

“I think that’s the balance,” mused Kaža toward the end of the night. “The character inside this capybara has a lot to do with certain types of human characters, and certain types of human decisions; and the same for the cat, and the same for the bird. But because they’re not human, they’re almost more relatable, right? The stakes are somehow higher just because they are animals, just because we feel, perhaps, more empathy towards them than we would feel for humans.”