The team were determined that all the "voices" should come from real animals, so they recorded actual animals for the film. To capture the capybara sound, the sound engineer travelled to a zoo and tickled the capybaras. However, the genuine capybara noises didn’t suit the personality envisaged for the capybara character, so they used a baby camel instead.
The whole film was produced and rendered exclusively with the free, open‑source application Blender.
No dialogue is spoken — only the animals' own sounds are heard.
Owing to the film's constrained budget, there are no deleted scenes; every scene that was filmed appears in the film's final cut.
In a Q&A at the New Zealand International Film Festival, the director said the animals were referred to only by their species — "Cat," "Retriever", etc. — and were not given names.
Latvia's official entry for the 'Best International Feature Film' category at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025.
The pet of sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas provided the noises for the film's central character, Cat: a female ginger cat called Miut. However, the recording proved difficult: on seeing the microphone she fell silent for almost two months, which made it hard for the designer to capture her sounds.
One day, while alone with Miut, Coïc-Gallas came across an old microphone and decided to follow her with it — he thereby managed to record all the vocalisations used for the film's main character.
The depiction of Cat from inside the house was sketched by director Gints Zilbalodis. It was the only piece of concept artwork he produced for the film, as everything else was modelled directly in Blender to save time.
The first independently produced film to be awarded the Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
The film's final sequence drew its inspiration from the Fanal Forest on the island of Madeira.
Flow was chosen to make its premiere in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A month later it was screened at the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, where it garnered the Jury Award, the Audience Award and the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution, all in the feature film category.
If you stay through the end credits, it becomes clear that the whale-like creature survives. Many viewers have speculated that the water levels rise and fall in a cyclical pattern. In one of the very early scenes featuring the cat, a boat can be seen briefly lodged high in a tree. That detail subtly indicates that the water recedes and returns, and that the whale remains alive.
The seventh film produced outside Disney and DreamWorks to be honoured with the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, following Spirited Away (2001), Happy Feet (2006), Rango (2011), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022), and The Boy and the Heron (2023).
The creatures depicted come from a wide range of real‑world locales. Because the film is not set in our present day — and perhaps not even in our world — this appears to be intentional. The secretary bird originates on the African savanna, the ring‑tailed lemur from Madagascar, the capybara from South America, and there are even a few spotted axis deer from India.
The whale was initially intended to be modelled on a real specimen, but was ultimately designed to appear more mythical.
At the conclusion of his Oscar acceptance speech, director Gints Zilbalodis said, "Yes, we are all in the same boat. We must find ways to bridge our differences and cooperate."
The birds depicted are, rather inaccurately, secretary birds. They are so unusual that they have been placed in their own taxonomic family, yet they are most closely related to ospreys, kites, hawks and eagles.
Owing to the film's popularity in Latvia, a statue of the cat featured in Flow was erected in Riga. It was initially placed outside the Freedom Monument and is due to be relocated to the Town Hall Square in April 2025.
To demonstrate which animals in the film possess higher intelligence and are capable of recognising themselves visually, they pass the "mirror test".
