Sorry Moana, You're Up Against This Cool Cat for Oscar
'Moana 2' and 'Inside Out 2' made bank, but Gints Zilbalodis' hauntingly inventive 'Flow' — on a $4M budget — could surprise everyone
I spent Thanksgiving weekend in my hometown in South Carolina and experienced something I never thought I would again: An enormous crowd lined up for a new release at the fairly shabby local AMC.
I had brought my children and their cousins to see Moana 2, and we were lucky to score seats in the very first row; the next showing, just an hour later, was almost completely sold out as well. We clearly weren’t the only ones. Moana 2 debuted as an instant smash, and by combining its powers with Gladiator II and Wicked the trio of releases created a long holiday weekend in which Hollywood, for once, truly had something for everyone.
Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 put Disney-Pixar in a fascinating position heading into this year’s best animated feature Oscar race. The studio is backing two enormous smash hits that are loved, but not nearly as well-loved as their predecessors and may struggle with awards because of it.
Undeniable Goliaths in the best animated feature category, with 15 wins across 23 years, Disney and Pixar still have formidable competition to deal with in this year’s race. The Wild Robot director Chris Sanders, a guest on my podcast back in October, has been nominated for best animated feature three times but never won. Meanwhile Aardman Animation’s icon Nick Park is back with the Netflix-backed Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, which could make for Park’s fifth Oscar win, and second for animated feature. (Wallace and Gromit starred in three animated short winners in the '90s, not bad for an old man and his dog.)
Then there are the outsiders, who are more competitive in this race than you might expect. The animation branch almost always makes room for an oddball contender from abroad, and this year can choose from such projects as Australia’s Memoir of a Snail — from Adam Elliot, who won the animated short Oscar in 2004 — or Latvia’s Flow. Later in this newsletter I’ll share my conversation with Flow’s director Gints Zilbalodis, and how he created a film that’s both haunting and entirely accessible to audiences of all ages (my kids included).
None of this necessarily means there won’t be room in the best animated feature race for Moana 2 or especially for Inside Out 2, which didn’t have to share its box office savior narrative when it opened in June. Then again, Moana 2’s origins as a Disney+ series may make it feel a little more episodic and disjointed than the original, but it’s a pretty powerful comeback awards narrative for an industry still digging itself out from the Streaming Wars.
Could a vote for Moana 2 mean a vote against streaming service disruption? And a vote for the triumph of theatrical? I’ve seen wilder campaign ideas work!
Going With the Flow
I’m perennially fascinated by the best animated feature race not only because I have young children (though it certainly helps), but because of the ways it can upend the expected Hollywood power rankings. Netflix has yet to take home its first best picture Oscar, but it won animated feature two years ago with Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. The anime-focused distributor GKids is almost never a force in awards season — unless, like last year, it’s releasing a film by legend Hayao Miyazaki, and besting Pixar and Netflix to win an Oscar for The Boy and the Heron.
That means that a dialogue-free Latvian film starring animals is absolutely competitive, especially when it’s as compelling as Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow. And Zilbalodis, despite his relaxed and genial nature, is probably getting used to blowing people away.
When Zilbalodis made the 2019 animated film Away entirely on his own, he earned acclaim that was mixed with astonishment; The Guardian praised the “extremely determined Latvian film-maker” who had made “something wondrous and original in a home studio.”
For his follow-up, Zilbalodis, 30, knew it was time to bring on collaborators and make something even more ambitious, but he wasn’t going to parlay his success into a job at a larger studio like DreamWorks Animation or Pixar. “I was lucky to have that opportunity to get the funding in Latvia,” says the filmmaker, who made his first animated short while he was still in high school.
“I don’t think a film like this could be made anywhere else, to have this trust in me,” says Zilbalodis, who lives in Riga, Latvia’s capital city. “And I think it’s exciting that there’s going to be more and more films made in places without big industries, and we’re going to see different perspectives on things from different types of people. Not just the different kinds of stories, but how they’re told.”
His new animated feature Flow, which has been making its way across the fall festival circuit since debuting at Cannes, is exceptional proof of that belief. Told entirely without dialogue — and backed by a haunting score composed by Zilbalodis and Rihards Galupe — it follows the journey of a standoffish black cat through a flooded world. The origin of the flood itself is a mystery, but so is the world itself: There are no humans but signs they once existed, from elaborate cities to an enormous mountaintop statue of a cat.
The world may be puzzling, but the cat and his eventual compatriots are recognizable and immediately lovable. There’s a gentle capybara, an enthusiastic yellow lab, an antic lemur and an enormous, quietly noble secretary bird, all together on a rowboat looking for salvation — or at least dry land.
“I feel like we’ve seen similar stories from a human perspective, but we never experienced a story like this from a cat’s perspective,” says Zilbalodis, who based both the dog and cat on his former pets. “I just wasn’t interested in humans. But I did want to leave some clues for the audience to consider what might have happened before the story began, or what might happen afterwards as well.”
Independent Spirit
When I saw Flow at the Toronto Film Festival in September it made a fascinating contrast with another festival premiere, The Wild Robot, another story about animals banding together to survive in the wild. Both are among the most acclaimed animated films of the year despite coming from wildly different circumstances — The Wild Robot a $78 million effort from DreamWorks Animation, and Flow made for $4 million pieced together with funds from three different European countries.
“Of course, it’s nice to have more money and to be less stressed about things,” Zilbalodis concedes. “But maybe when you have fewer resources, it forces you to really focus and be more deliberate.”
For Zilbalodis, being deliberate also means making room for improvisation, which in his case involved building an animated sketch of the world of Flow and moving his virtual camera within it, creating some of the sweeping shots that make the film such a visual marvel. Though Zilbalodis was working with a team this time, this part of the process was more like being a one-man band.
“Because I wrote the script, I’m not precious about it,” he explains. “I’m adapting it and making discoveries. And I do this myself because some of these things are kind of hard to explain my intention to others.”
One of the most captivating things about Flow is what’s explained and what’s not. We understand the slowly developing bond between the cat and the capybara without dialogue, but the nature of this world — and even the destination where their boat eventually takes them — remains mysterious.
When I watched Flow a second time with my children, they had the same big questions I did: Where did the cat statues come from? What’s up with the giant whale-like creatures? I warned them that Zilbalodis probably wouldn’t answer these questions in our interview, and he didn’t — but emphasized that they had understood everything they needed to know anyway.
“I feel like kids are a lot smarter than people tend to believe and can follow the stories. And I think this is a pretty easy-to-understand story,” he says. “I want the audience to think about the characters first, and that was my main priority. But I think it’s kind of interesting to have these evocative images. It’s more interesting to tell the story where the audience has to put the pieces together themselves.”
