The Latvian director employs beautifully stylized and detailed 3D animation, somewhat photoreal, somewhat painterly, to tell without words his engaging story about a cat waking up in a world invaded by water, where humans have disappeared, who must belay his instincts and learn to get along with a group of animals in order to survive.
After three shorts films and one feature that he made by himself, award-winning filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis decided it was time to learn how to work with a team., the Latvian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards, is Zilbalodis’ first collaborative project.
The animated feature follows the adventures of a cat who also learns the value of relying on others. “It's a very personal story to me,” shares Zilbalodis in a Q&A session at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival following a screening of his film.“I thought that a cat would be a great character to convey this, because cats are very independent and want to do things their own way.I had this imposter syndrome going into the project.
Doubts and insecurities.But you have to face those insecurities.If I kept making films by myself for the rest of my life, they wouldn’t be as good.” , produced by Dream Well Studio, Take Five, and Sacrebleu Productions, centers on a cat who wakes up in a universe invaded by water, where all human life seems to have disappeared.
He finds refuge on a boat with a group of other animals – a secretary bird, capybara, Labrador retriever and ring-tailed lemur – but finds that getting along with them is an even bigger challenge than overcoming a fear of water. Check out the trailer: “The cat changes in the story from this independent character to learning how to work together and the dog is on an opposite journey where he starts out being very trustful and always looking for someone to tell him what to do but learns to be more independent,” explains Zilbalodis, unpacking his choices of animals in the film.“The other animals were chosen thinking about the theme of the film, which is looking for a place or a group that accepts you and looking for your place in the world.The Lemur is obsessed with these shiny objects that are a means to being liked.
The bird chooses to defend the cat over his flock and gets quite punished for it.The capybara is the only one in the group that has total peace and acceptance.” The film, releasing in theaters today, November 22, has won three Annecy International Animation Film Festival awards as well as the Grand Prize for Feature Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.Its animation rests somewhere between photoreal and painterly and pulls the viewer in with its quiet moments of serenity and massive amounts of detail.
Throw in the sun glares and it’s absolutely lovely to watch. “The look kept being developed all the way throughout the production,” shares Zilbalodis.“My intention was to create a very immersive world to make you sense all the textures and the wind and the grass and the water, and to have the camera be an active participant, not just observing things from a distance.And for that, I think the environments are so much more detailed, although if you pause and look closely at the details, you can still see some brush strokes and some imperfections, which, of course, are there for a reason.” He continues, “But I wanted the characters to be somewhat more stylized and graphic.
I think they become somewhat more appealing, and we can project our own experiences on these characters when there isn't not too much detail, and we can see our own cats in this cat.” Paying especially close attention to the way the animals in the film would naturally move and react in certain situations, Zilbalodis wanted the animals’ actions to be as accurate and grounded to their true natures as possible while still allowing their expressions, pauses and outbursts to serve as a type of dialogue and guidepost for the story. “I knew that there would be no dialogue because there hasn’t been dialogue in any of the films I've done so far,” says Zilbalodis.“For that reason, I wanted the animals to behave like animals and not speak and not tell jokes.I think, for better or worse, we care more about animals in films than people.
They carry an innocence and purity where we don’t want them to experience anything bad.But we’ve seen similar stories like this told from a human point of view and I think it’s a fresh perspective seeing it from an animal point of view.” But Zilbalodis and his small team had only a matter of months to create their feature after production began.Thankfully, he notes, there was an endless library of cat videos on YouTube. “We looked at a lot of references for all the animal movements, but everything's hand animated,” notes the director.
“We didn't use any motion capture or anything like that because of the water, which we couldn't put real animals into with the long takes.” Zilbalodis also did away with storyboards for the film and, instead, built the characters and environments directly in 3D during pre-production so that he could explore the virtual environment with a virtual camera.However, that’s not a new tactic for him. “Some people can imagine all the details in their head,” he shares.“They know exactly how the film should look and what should happen.
But I don't have that ability.I need to go through that process of discovery.” Despite the tight deadlines, discovery was the name of the game for this production, whether it came to animation style or story.Accidental discovery plays a huge role in the movie became. “I knew that I needed a goal in this journey, so that it doesn't feel like they're endlessly lost at sea,” says Zilbalodis of his animal characters.
“I was writing the music while I was still writing the script and this one piece of music unlocked everything for me.The cat on this journey is always running away from its problems.When there's something bad happening, it climbs up somewhere, as cats do.
But, of course, the problems don't go away.Eventually, the cat and the bird – who has been outcast from its flock – climb up this stone tower, the furthest away from the problems they could get.And maybe they escaped the problems, but they also escaped everything else.
And, in a way, they get detached from reality, then they're lost in this emptiness.” The bird is depressed because it lost its family and was publicly shamed for trying to protect its friend, the cat.Meanwhile, the cat has simply had enough of all the nonsense and nickering on the boat.The two animals jump ship as the boat floats by one of the setting’s rock towers and they begin to climb, reaching the top.
Suddenly, a large portal opens above the bird and the cat.The bird ascends into this unknown portal in the sky while pushing the cat down so his feline friend can continue to live. “The music suggests there are positives and negatives to the approach of leaving behind your worries and fears,” says Zilbalodis.“Maybe it's the end of something.
Maybe it's the beginning of something new.But basically, the bird forces the cat to reconsider going back down and facing its problems, leaving its comfort zone and jumping back in the water.The bird felt it had lost its hope but doesn't want the cat to end up in the same place.” There aren’t totally clear meanings to scenes such as this one, or even the end sequence.
There’s a lot of symbolism.But some scenes lend themselves to abstract ideas with more than one conclusion.Zilbalodis says he’s been intentional about not telling audiences what to think as they watch his film, since everyone is on their own life journey and will take away different things from each scene.
Still, he emphasizes to the SCAD Savannah students and festival audiences to create stories that are personal to events one’s experienced because that’s where the most emotional storytelling comes through. “We made this film in a place where there isn't a big industry, so I think it's really exciting that people from different parts of the world and different experiences can tell their stories and can take more risks with smaller budgets and a smaller team.I want to keep making personal stories.I'm already working on the next one.
It's a little bit bigger in terms of the budget and it's the first time I'm using some dialog, which is a new challenge for me.It’s still a very visual film, but I think it's important to challenge myself.I don't want to make the same film over and over, so I'm going to kind of keep going in this direction.” Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime.
She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment.Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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