The only reason I haven’t seen Flow—the beautiful animated film about a group of animals who survive a flood—yet is because I did not want to sob in public as loudly as I am certain to sob at this movie. Have you seen the trailer? The trailer made me cry. Twice.
But plenty of people have seen and loved Flow, including Golden Globe voters; the film won Best Motion Picture—Animated at the awards last night. Accepting the award, director Gints Zilbalodis said, “I made all my films myself but this time I worked with a team and just like the cat in Flow, I had to learn how to trust others, how to collaborate, how to overcome our differences, and I think its very important to remember this nowadays, more than ever.”
Back in October, Zilbalodis spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the making of the film, and the interview is overall a really interesting conversation about different kinds of animation and ways to make movies. But one bit stuck out to Reactor’s somewhat capybara-obsessed team: The fact that someone got the absolutely enviable job of tickling a capybara in order to record the sounds it made:
We tried to record a capybara, but they don’t really speak. They’re very silent. They only make noise when you tickle them. So it was one person’s very fun job to tickle a capybara. But the sound was really high-pitched and sounded more like an anxious small dog. It didn’t fit the character. So we looked around for another animal and, after a long kind of search, we settled on this baby camel. So the capybara is actually voiced by a baby camel. All the others are the real animals. Even the different breeds of dog.
In my next life, I wish to be a capybara tickler.
Flow will be available on demand January 7th, and is still in some theaters, if you are made of strong enough stuff and/or can pack enough tissues.
