Flow

Gints Zilbalodis made a film with no dialogue, and no animal is given human speech. The voices are real recordings: the cat is Miut, sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas’s own pet, the capybara a baby camel, the whale a tiger pitched down. One camera decision shaped everything. Because Zilbalodis wanted long unbroken takes, nothing was storyboarded; he drops an animal into the environment and keyframes the camera by hand, moving camera and character together. It was built in Blender, free and open source, on 3.5 million euros with a crew of about 45, and Zilbalodis wrote the score with Rihards Zaļupe. The record: a Cannes premiere in Un Certain Regard; at Annecy the Jury Award, the Audience Award and best original music, with the Cristal going to Memoir of a Snail; the Golden Globe, the César and the Academy Award for animated feature; a separate Oscar nomination for international feature as Latvia’s entry; and BAFTA nominations for animated film and for children’s and family film, both lost to Wallace and Gromit. No Latvian film had been nominated, or won, before. A good fit if you will do the work of reading an animal’s intent from an ear flick and a shoulder. Not for a viewer who wants named characters and a stated rule for how this drowned world works.