While the cat protagonist from the Oscar-nominated animated movie Flow is getting a lot of (deserved) love — and will get more now that Flow is streaming on Max — the movie actually has a whole cast of animals, which hunker together on a tiny boat adrift in the middle of rapidly rising waters. In addition to the cat, there’s a grumpy capybara, an inquisitive lemur, an overly friendly dog, and a regal secretary bird. None of these animals were present in the movie’s original iteration, a student film by director Gints Zilbalodis, which was more about the cat overcoming a fear of water. Zilbalodis told Polygon that as the film evolved, so did the central theme.
“I decided to revisit this idea and make it really more about the cat’s relationship with other characters and other animals,” he says. “It was my first film that I worked with a big team, and I wanted to tell a story about a character who has to learn how to trust others, and how to work together. And I thought the cat would be a great character to convey that, because we know cats don’t really work together with others, and it would create this good character arc.”
Zilbalodis went through a few iterations to get the cast just right. The dog, he says was inspired by two dogs he’s had since the original short film. He also added more lemurs to the movie to explain why the primary lemur is so desperate for approval. But one of the biggest changes came not just for thematic reasons, but also from a more practical concern.
“There was a bird character in the short film, but that was, I think, a seagull,” he explained. “And it didn’t fit this idea really well with the story I had in mind for Flow. So I changed it to a secretary bird because it needed to have this… The cat needed to look up to this bird in the beginning. It needed to have this authority and presence. I saw that these secretary birds had that, and they’re also very big. There are not many birds that would be able to carry a cat. I’m not even sure if a secretary bird would be able to do that, but at least it makes more sense than a seagull.”
Even with the diverse animal cast — capybaras, lemurs, secretary birds, oh my! — the cat and the dog still proved most difficult to animate. Because people are more likely to interact with cats and dogs on a regular basis, any inaccurate movement or behavior would be far more obvious to the audience.
“With the lemur or the secretary bird, which most people have not seen as much as cats and dogs, I think we can have a little bit more freedom,” Zilbalodis explained. After a moment of thinking, though, he added, “Birds are hard. The wings are really hard, the way they fold, and to have the feathers work correctly.”
Flow is streaming on Max now, and available for rental or purchase at Amazon, Fandango, and other digital outlets.
