The Budget for Animated Hit ‘Flow’ Was So Tight, the Film Has No Deleted Scenes

IndieWire has already written at length about why “Flow,” the adorable, inventive tale of a cat dealing with an apparently post-apocalyptic reality, is the best animated movie of the year — and one of the best films of 2024 full stop. In our review out of Cannes, where it premiered in Un Certain Regard, we said it was “one of the most groundbreaking animated films about nature since ‘Bambi.'”

As more people have seen the Sideshow and Janus release, “Flow” has won many more admirers — including those astonished at how the wordless Latvian film, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, who previously had made his films largely by himself, came together on such a small budget. Zilbalodis addressed the issue to IndieWire on the 2025 Golden Globes red carpet, alongside producer Matīss Kaža.

“I think it’s sometimes good to have some limitations,” Zilbalodis told IndieWire of his film’s budget. “I think it pushes you in a new and original way creatively. We had to be very precise. I’m very proud that we don’t have deleted scenes, that everything that we put in the film ended up on the screen. And I think that’s a good lesson to really focus [on] … I was wearing a lot of hats myself, so I was kind of multitasking, and everyone was multitasking. We did it in very unconventional ways. I thought there was no reason just to copy what everyone else was doing, because then we’re not going to stand out. But if you try something new and take some risks, I think then we have a chance, and I guess it worked out for us.”

“It was very challenging in the sense that we had to figure out a way to have the best possible character animation, which was very, very important for it to feel naturalistic,” Kaža added. “But of course, being from a small country as a majority co-producer meant working with a lot of limitations. So what we did is hire a lot of very young animators from France in their mid-20s, most of them probably right out of film schools. And they were very, very motivated to work on the project, and they did a great job. Of course, they watched a lot of cat videos online for reference for the cat movement. But I think now, with this movie on their resume, they’ll all have a bright future ahead of them, on many wonderful projects. So we’re very happy it turned out the way it did.

As for whether this filmmaking team is going to go Hollywood — on a purely technical level, the animation in “Flow” rivals anything you could see in a film by Pixar or DreamWorks — Kaža says not to worry.

“Also, I know there’s a lot of people jealous because it’s such a low-budget movie,” Kaža said. “But we’re gonna keep, in the future, working in a similar way doing European co-productions because that allows us to have that creative freedom that is sometimes restricted in bigger systems like in Hollywood.”