Flow is the latest wordless animation winning acclaim

NEW YORK – Like Noah’s Ark minus the humans, a vessel carrying an odd bunch of creatures is afloat after a flood in the immersive computer-animated film Flow. Led by a black cat, the group faces the dangers of nature together, often struggling to get along yet communicating entirely without dialogue.

It is the second wordless feature from Latvian film-maker Gints Zilbalodis, who argues that animation is more expressive than live action.

“You can use that expressiveness to convey things usually said with words,” he said in a recent video interview.

Viewers see how the animals behave – including a stoic capybara, a cheerful dog, a regal secretary bird and a rambunctious lemur – Zilbalodis added, and that is their way into understanding the characters.

It won the audience award at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the world’s most prominent event for the medium. And Flow is now the Latvian Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film, a category for films not in English – an ironic designation, given that it is a wordless fable.

It opens exclusively at The Projector on Dec 5.

The absence of dialogue lends itself to animation, because “we’re able to suspend our disbelief”, Zilbalodis said. “It also forces me to think of unusual ways to relay emotions and ideas. I can’t have the characters speak about them – I have to use the camera, the lighting, editing and music.”

Watching Flow, one becomes hyper-aware of environmental sounds, especially wind and water.

Zilbalodis assumed that his French sound designer, Gurwal Coic-Gallas, would enjoy the task. But in a recent interview, Coic-Gallas said he was initially anxious about the responsibility of creating a soundscape that could not hide behind dialogue and – at times – not even a score.

“I was very afraid that the audience could fall asleep in the movie,” he said. “We worked a lot on the narrative immersion because the soundscape reflects the emotion of the cat.” By the end of making Flow, Coic-Gallas considered his first time working on a project devoid of dialogue to have been “an incredible gift”.

Flow joins a growing number of animated features without dialogue produced away from American studios that consistently grace the line-up of renowned cinematic events like the Cannes Film Festival, subsequently gaining the attention of industry professionals and awards bodies.

Zilbalodis, who started his own production company Dream Well Studio, does not believe Hollywood would produce films like his. (Flow is a co-production with two other studios in France and Belgium.)

“Making films in a more independent way allows me not just to tell stories which are unconventional, but the way that they’re told can be different as well,” he said, referring to the long takes he used in Flow, which sometimes go uninterrupted for several minutes.

Chiming in via e-mail, Dutch film-maker Michael Dudok de Wit, whose Oscar-nominated film The Red Turtle (2016) is an animated tale of man’s relationship to nature, said dispensing with dialogue required paying extra attention to the animated body language of the characters to make sure their motives were clear.

“The biggest reward of making The Red Turtle dialogue-free was that the absence of spoken language helped convey that very subtle quality that I love so much in many films – timelessness,” Dudok de Wit said. “It’s a quality I recognise in mythology, for instance, and in music.”

For Brazilian director Ale Abreu, whose debut Boy And The World (2013) – also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film – deals with the evils of capitalism and environmental devastation, making a film without dialogue was a “delicious challenge”.

“If an important narrative resource is given up in the construction of the script and characters, there’s a possibility for other languages to be established,” Abreu said. “Not using dialogue puts the creator, and then the viewer, in a different state of mind based only on the power of the image and sound directly expressing the emotion of the film.”

A more practical advantage, Abreu added, is that not needing dubs or even subtitles greatly facilitates the circulation of a film around the world, as it becomes universally accessible.

For Zilbalodis, making all of his features and shorts to date dialogue-free was in part because of his lack of confidence in writing lines for his characters.

The concept for Flow first emerged as a short film titled Aqua, which Zilbalodis made while in high school, inspired by a cat he had at the time. In that early precursor, the cat was alone and surrounded by water, a set-up with built-in conflict, since felines dislike water.

“When I decided to revisit this premise, I wanted to focus more on the cat’s relationship with other animals, and how these two fears – the fear of water and of others – are linked,” he said.

Worried that dialogue might draw all of the attention, the director tried to avoid making a film that could just be put on in the background, and had to be listened to in order to follow the story.

“You really need to pay attention to understand Flow, but if you do, you’ll be rewarded by something really engaging,” Zilbalodis said. “The experience is more important than the plot.” NYTIMES