The Latvian film, “Flow,” a dialogue-free tale of animals surviving a catastrophe, won the Oscar for best animated feature on Sunday, capping a remarkable awards season.
A solitary black cat is confronted by a sudden flood, and the moving movie follows her reluctantly on a journey with an unruly capybara and a buoyant golden retriever.
The work of independent Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis defeated “Inside Out 2,” “Memoir of a Snail,” “Wallace &, Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” and “The Wild Robot” to win the award, the first of its kind in Latvia.
We’re all in the same boat, we must overcome our differences and find ways to work together, thank you. Zilbalodis acknowledged that achievement onstage by accepting his statuette.
The plot for Zilbalodis reflects his own experience, which was that he learned to work as a team after making his first film independently.
In an interview before the Oscars, Zilbalodis explained to AFP that “this is a story about a character who begins out very independent and then has to learn how to trust others and collaborate.”
With a modest $3.6 million budget, “Flow” has captivated audiences and critics, and it has also made history for Latvian cinema, according to Zilbalodis.
The Baltic nation’s 1.8 million-person population saw its first Oscar nominations for any film in the best animated feature and international film categories.
More than 15, 000 fans visited the museum in Riga where Zilbalodis displayed the statuette after “Flow” won the Golden Globe Award in January, which was then the highest award ever given to a Latvian film.
The cat learns that people have abandoned their homes and that water is rushing into the nearby meadows as the movie progresses.
The cat and a dog, a capybara, a secretary bird, and a lemur form an unlikely friendship against this apocalyptic backdrop, which all display their distinguishing characteristics.
The group learns to coexist and follow each other’s rules and expectations as they board a sailboat in the choppy water.
Who Will Win the Oscar, Also Read? The Top 10 Best Picture Winners
Tickle the capybara, please.
After taking their characteristics into account, Zilbalodis created the movie using Blender, a free open-source program, and modeled his animal characters.
The protagonists make their own sounds, which the director recorded from real-life animals, with one notable exception, but not utterly absent from the entire movie.
According to Zilbalodis, the crew went to a zoo, but the capybara was usually silent, so they were forced to provide “extra assistance.”
According to Zilbalodis, “a zookeeper had to actually enter and tickle the capybara.”
The result was a high-pitched noise that the “Flow” team felt was inappropriate for the relaxed capybara, which the crew did not anticipate.
In the end, they chose a baby camel as their alternative sound actor.
The Oscar-nominated animated movie “Flow” is still the only other to surpass both the domestic and international motion categories.
More than 300,000 people saw it in theaters, according to Latvia’s film center, making it the most-viewed movie in Latvian history, surpassing “Avatar” and “Titanic.”
Zilbalodis claimed that the “innocence” of the animals contributed to this success.
Because we share much more in common than we might think, he said, “This just shows that we can connect with these kinds of characters.”
“We all have the same needs, instincts, and fears.”
Source: Channels TV
Leave a Reply