Halt Disney! Flow’s director, and fellow upstart animators, on a new era for the artform

At the ​​Academy Awards last weekend, a little Latvian film ​scooped ​the ​prize for best animation​. Here ​its creator Gints Zilbalodis, and ​other Oscar nominees of micro-budget films, ​discuss ​taking risks and challenging the big studios

Flow is a gorgeous animated Noah’s Ark tale-of-sorts that bobs into cinemas like a message in a bottle. The brainchild of Gints Zilbalodis, a 30-year-old Latvian film-maker, it’s about an unnamed house cat cast adrift on a sailboat alongside a capybara and a ring-tailed lemur. The world has flooded; one disaster follows another. The animals on the boat have to help one another or die. Flow contains no human life and not one line of actual dialogue. Despite this, it is eloquent and humane and almost unbearably tense.

Animators, says Zilbalodis, are a little like cats, in that they tend to be self-sufficient, antisocial and have to be coaxed into joining a team. Flow’s production involved Zilbalodis abandoning his desk to oversee a small crew of artists. He had to learn how to delegate, collaborate and risk having his ideas challenged and shot down. The finished film, therefore, is almost a parable of its own making; a comment on all those behind-the-scenes negotiations. It’s a salute to the loners who need to pool their resources, and the endangered beasts on the margins that have to adapt to survive.