This year, several movies such as Inside Out 2, Memoir of a Snail, Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and The Wild Robot were nominated for best animated feature but the movie that won the Oscar was the movie Flow, a movie about a cat whose home is destroyed in a devastating flood and finds refuge on a boat filled with several other types of animals and they have to team up despite their differences.
An article written at The New York Times by Esther Zuckerman talks about her experience watching flow- or should I say her dogs, Daisy. She explains how she was returning home from dinner with her boyfriend when she decided to watch the Oscar-winning movie, and she saw that her corgi mix, Daisy, was extremely fascinated with the film. She then goes on to say that when she looked on TikTok to see if anyone else’s pets did this, she saw a multitude of other animals doing the same. She explains how this trend is a cute conclusion to what was already one of the feel-good indie movies with no dialogue. Esther later went on to see the movie in theaters and said how it was a wonderfully immersive experience where you lose yourself in the animation and the overall visuals of the movie. She then compares watching the movie at home to watching it in theaters and she says that they each have different pros and cons. She says that when she watched the movie at home via the streaming service Max, she felt that her attention was pulled in two different directions, as you try to think what this movie means to you as it means to your pet. Matiss Kaza, the producer and co-writer of the film said in an email that he suspects that it’s the real animal sounds used in production that attract our domesticated friends. “We don’t commonly think of pets as a potential target audience when making films, but we are glad that ‘Flow’ has proved to be a special bonding experience between viewers and their dogs and cats.”
Another article written at NPR by Bob Mondello talks more about the plot of the movie and the message that it gives. Bob explains that Cat, the unnamed main character of the movie, begins in a forest which is blooming with life. All of a sudden, all the animals that were running around are running away, not looking where they are going. Cat looks where they are coming from and all of a sudden sees flood water gushing towards them. The water sweeps Cat up and strands it on a tree branch, then on a hill near a sculptor’s studio that, in this moment, is the only sign that there were ever humans. Over the next few days, Cat discovers the safety is brief. The water is rising and slowly submerging the studio and soon there won’t be anywhere left to stand. Just as Cat thinks this, an abandoned boat floats by and Cat jumps aboard. When Bob is writing this article, he wants the reader to feel like they are with Cat when the water comes towards them ,and he makes it feel real. He describes scenes from the movie in great detail and makes you want to watch the movie on your own. Bob says in the article that the message of the story is teamwork and cooperation. He talks about how Gints Zilbalodis, a filmmaker from Latvia, had help from animators from Belgium and France to make the breathtaking backgrounds look photorealistic. They used a “virtual” camera that span around and followed animals they’ve rendered to look hand-drawn. Bob describes it as if a 3D Bambi were romping through a nature documentary. One last thing that Bob says is that unlike other animated animals, the animals in Flow are mostly voiced by other animals. Most of the animals are voiced by their real-life species to make sure the animals sounded as realistic as possible. When they couldn’t be voiced by their exact animal, they would use a similarly sounding animal. An example of this would be when they couldn’t use real capybara noises, they used baby camel noises.
One last article written at The Hollywood Reporter by Mia Galuppo talks more about how Flow won and what happened at the Oscars. When Flow won Best Animated Feature, it beat two film franchise powerhouses, Disney and DreamWorks. The movies that Flow beat to win Best Animated Feature were Inside Out 2, Memoir of a Snail, Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and The Wild Robot. Zilbalodis, while accepting the Oscar, said “I am really moved by the warm reception…I am hoping it will open doors to independent animation or filmmakers around the world.” In another interview, he said “At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, there’s something about the purity of great animation storytelling that can shatter your heart and make it whole again.” The film cost a total of $3.7 million to produce whereas The Wild Robot cost $78 million and Inside Out 2 cost $200 million.
