Numlock Sunday: John Adkins on what the Flow win means
We talk to Animation Obsessive!
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to John Adkins, who writes the outstanding newsletter
.I love this newsletter, it’s a personal must-read of mine, and last week following the thrilling win for Flow at the Academy Awards I loved the post the Animation Obsessive team wrote about it and diving deep into just why this is such a milestone in the field of animation.
We spoke about how the European funding model differs from the American one, why it’s so remarkable that an Academy Award winning movie was made in Blender, and what this means for animation.
John can be found at Animation Obsessive.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
John, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
You are the creator, author of one of my favorite newsletters. I really love newsletters that come at a place of expertise and dive in relentlessly on some of the coolest stuff in an art form. And you guys do that over at Animation Obsessive. Before we dive into Flow and this year in animation and all that stuff, do you want to talk a little bit about the history of the newsletter and the history of the project as a whole?
Sure thing. Animation Obsessive has been on Substack since 2021. We cover animation around the world and across time with a focus especially on some of the more uncharted waters or unexplored corners. It's partly a research project. It's partly a treasure hunt.
It's a little bit investigative. It's supposed to be inspiring and interesting. It's not just for the hardcore. It's intended to be for anybody who is interested in art and creativity and culture and history and all that stuff.
You've had some pretty remarkable finds. I think one of the ones that I had seen, at least of yours, that went the farthest was you found this gouache color palette that Hayao Miyazaki at one point vouched for. And you can get these behind-the-scenes insights from some really tremendous artists but also in a really accessible way. You have some really cool stuff on there.
Really appreciate it. Yeah, the Miyazaki piece is actually our most popular article of all time; we had no idea that was going to happen. It's just like a little quick guide to how Miyazaki used watercolors and people just really resonated with that. I mean, I'm not sure what else to say.
So, again, you cover animation as a whole. You can view it from a lot of different perspectives, whether it's the evolution of it as an art form over the course of the 20th century. It is a really accessible art form. It's a medium that a lot of people have strong feelings about or at least innate feelings about. It could be a good medium in particular for kids. But at the same time, it can have some really resonant films. We just had the Oscars, and do you want to talk a little bit (before we dive into Flow in particular) about the relationship between the Oscars and animation?
Oh, yeah. The Oscars, they're a bit controversial in the animation world because a few years ago there was the problem of the presenters talking about animation just being for kids. And, there's a lot of people who create animation who only work for adults. They're making serious art films, not to throw kids’ media under the bus, obviously. But there are many, many sides of the animation industry that the Academy doesn't necessarily always let in. Or maybe they nominate them and the nomination is the award, as sometimes people say in the animation world.
But in recent years, the Academy has been diversifying who has a say in the winners of the animation Oscars. It’s international, there's more people who are actually in animation.
And we've seen a little bit of the results of that with some of the recent wins and some of the recent nominations that have been very left field, like Robot Dreams last year. I think a lot of people would never have predicted that they would get a nomination. And in the animated short film category, it's actually been a while since a big studio won that category. And this year, there wasn't even a big studio short nominated. So, yeah, things are shifting. And I think Flow is the ultimate example of where that is leading.
Yeah let’s talk about Flow, which really, I think, got a pretty solid feature, not just from, obviously, the victory, but also you got a couple shout outs during the telecast. There's some really interesting things about the production that I think are worthwhile. Can you just speak about what Flow is, how it got made, and what makes it particularly interesting for fans of the medium?
For sure. So Flow is a wordless film about animals on a boat during a giant apocalyptic flood. It was made by an extremely small team in Latvia and Belgium and France. The director is from Latvia. He's the first Latvian ever nominated for an Academy Award, let alone the first to win. And he's a self-taught filmmaker. His film before this one, he made entirely by himself. It was a feature film that he made in Blender, which is free software. I read somewhere that he made it for like $40,000 or something.
Incredible.
That's amazing. Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's a real incredible achievement for somebody to make a feature film by themselves like that. And the ethos that he started there carried over into Flow. And Flow is a very low-budget film. It costs less than $4 million, which for animation is just outrageous, almost unheard of. Even in Europe, where animation budgets are lower, this was fairly low. The director, Gints Zilbalodis, said that it was a huge budget for Latvia. But in France, where the film was mostly animated, it was actually on the low end.
One of the things that makes this film so different is the animal characters are not anthropomorphized. This is not Disney animation. The animals move in a somewhat realistic way, but also not hyper-realistic. It's very studied from real life. At the same time, their goal is to elevate it slightly. And so you have these animals who move in a fairly realistic way. They don't talk. There's not a single word spoken in the entire film. And yet the film manages to maintain real tension, real emotional resonance. You get a real sense of the characters, even though there's no dialogue. It's also shot in this very unusual way for animation, where there's these very long takes, sometimes up to five minutes, with no cuts. There's this roaming camera that takes you through this world that's being flooded. It's just shot in a very different way than the more traditional Pixar style of cinematography, which is very solid, very classic.
And this one, the camera is just — I think Zilbalodis said that it was like its own character. It really does feel almost like another character in the world with these animals. It’s just a really powerful movie that doesn't necessarily have a traditional story. The story is minute by minute what you're watching, and you're there with the animals reacting to each new thing. For some reason, for 90 minutes, it's just gripping for almost everybody who watches it.
I watched the film, it’s just amazing. The camera, to your point, drew some comparison to video games. It doesn’t have a prescribed plot beat. I also saw the Wild Robot which had some similarities on paper — animals, goals, that stuff. But there were no prescribed plot elements. There weren't scenes in which goals occurred and happened. It felt like it was an attention-driven camera. The camera went where it was interested in going, and you yourself then got interested in it, too. It felt like nothing I've ever really seen, not just in the category, but it felt like in animation in general.
Yeah, absolutely. It's an evolution of what Zilbalodis was doing in his last film, Away, but much more polished, much more thorough and nuanced. He cited live-action films partly as an influence. There's a famous film called I Am Cuba that was one of his early influences. He's also cited video games in the past as an influence. So you have that mixture of elements in there to bring this attention-driven camera. What keeps you hooked in this film is the fact that you're being grabbed every second by whatever the camera's looking at. And if it wasn't for that, the film would fall apart.
The film is very slow-paced and meditative and all of these things, but it almost feels like every moment having that kind of energy infused into it, it almost feels like a film for the TikTok age in a way. It is never willing to lose your interest. It's always trying to keep your interest, but in a very quiet way.
Yeah, it's like a very opportunistic camera. It's really, really fun. It's miraculous that an award that first went to Shrek went to this movie.
Yeah, they are kind of polar opposites.
Yeah. Can you speak a little bit — and this isn't getting too technical, I hope — but to the Blender of it? It just seems like this is a real technological moment where fire has been stolen from the gods. You have a piece of free software that is now responsible for being the technological heft behind an Academy Award-nominated, winning film.
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll try to keep it as non-technical as I can. But yeah, Blender is this free software. It's been developing for decades now. Initially, a lot of people in the animation business didn't really think it was going to be that useful for animation because it was a fairly limited piece of software compared to, say, Maya. But it has kept trying to build up all these years. In Europe, there have been films made at least partly or entirely with Blender, some of which have been Oscar nominees in the past. I Lost My Body, which came out of Netflix a few years ago, was another European film that was made pretty much entirely in Blender. That one was really good as well.
With Flow, they've pushed in a stranger direction than most Blender films I've seen. I'm not sure if your readers are familiar with the idea of a render farm.
No, take us there.
Well, the big Pixar movies and stuff like that, rendering a finished frame of one of those films, even one frame, is a very, very, very energy and computing-consuming process. It's very difficult. You need a render farm, a group of dedicated computers and all of that, to render even one frame of all of that information.
On Flow, I recently read that Gints Zilbalodis rendered the entire film on his personal computer at the end.
Oh my god.
Because of how simple the whole setup was compared to, say, a big Hollywood film. He said there was no compositing stage. I won't go into it, but that is unbelievable for an animated film like this. It's a real technical feat that he was able to make this work. And obviously the film doesn't look like a giant Hollywood movie. It doesn't have the detail of the fur, the lighting isn't as complex and all of these things. But what the film has proven is that audiences don't necessarily need all of those complexities. The film looks good and what keeps you engaged is other things. It's the strength and originality of the vision and the interest of these characters and all of these kinds of things.
If you go back and look at some of the early Pixar films like Toy Story, they don't exactly look fantastic by today’s standards in terms of visual fidelity. But they still hold up as films because of the very strong scripts, the very compelling characters, animation and the tight filmmaking. So it's just another lesson that audiences are willing to respond to that even if you don't necessarily have the most incredible visual fidelity.
Yeah. There was something you mentioned that I wanted to dive into just a little bit. The environmental stuff, like how this movie can be produced outside of the immense systems that we have produced in the United States and in several other countries to make animated films. The first thing that people will notice when they watch Flow is about four and a half minutes of studio titles. On one hand, that is a bit funny at times. But on the other hand, it is actually integral to how this thing gets made. From the money perspective, how did this thing happen?
Yeah, I mean, it really does come down to those logos at the start of the film. A lot of different parties across Europe get involved in this stuff and contribute a small amount of money at a time. Flow was a five year process. Zilbalodis said that the production of it actually was only less than a year. The rest of it was trying to find studio partners, people willing to fund it. There's a whole network of film funds and tax shelters and incentives and rebates and all of this stuff in different European countries. A country like Latvia is very small, but even it has a fairly rich support for filmmakers, for animators.
Whereas in Hollywood animation, it is very common for Disney to invest an enormous amount of money into a single project. And it turns into a giant gamble. I mean, as we've seen in some of the recent Disney films, Wish or Strange World. Those movies were just enormous flops that lost the company a lot of money because they were very expensive. If for whatever reason, one of those movies doesn't pan out and audiences don't take to it, then it becomes a massive loss. With this European system, the risk is spread around. The budgets are low, but there's a lot of planning and prepping that happens in the early stages as they prepare to get this thing to happen. The budgets and schedules tend to be very tight, but these are teams that have gotten used to the idea that they basically can't go over budget, they can't go over schedule because the resources aren't necessarily there for them to do that.
For example, I read from the Kevin Giraud Substack (he runs the Animation Belgian). He did a great interview with some of the Belgian staffers on Flow, and they said they didn't go a day or a cent over budget. And there was no crunch, which is unheard of in Hollywood for no crunch. Crunch culture is a very dangerous thing in Hollywood that the executives know about and lean into. They just take it for granted. On Flow, at least for the Belgian team, they said there was no crunch, which is just miraculous for a film like this.
That's incredible. Folks should check out the whole feature that you did on them, and also just check out your work in general. You have such good stuff, not just the history of animation, but the history of labor and animation. I feel like I must have learned about the movie The Sweatbox from you. Did you feature that at any point?
Yeah, we did feature it at one point.
I'll link it here. But again, for the history of crunch and even a Disney project can have so much risk built into it for such a massive upfront cost. It just seems like it's a perilous way to make films. Flow has a lot of intersecting ideas: new technologies that are available and funding streams becoming viable. It seems like it was a really interesting moment for the future of this very, very cool medium.
For folks who are potentially new to your newsletter, are there any particular archival entries that you would recommend folks check out?
What would I recommend? Let me think.
You guys made me into a Kon-head, that's for sure. Millennium Actress is one of my favorite films, and I think that you guys were the ones who introduced me to that. I'll be happy to link up some of my favorites.
I really appreciate that.
One I've recommended, maybe from last year, “When a Film Doesn't Look Like it's Concept Art.” It's an article about Disney and the problem of making a film that actually lives up to the gorgeous artwork that many of us have seen at this point from various films. The great work of Mary Blair, one of the Disney all-timers.
I might also recommend “Selling Ghost in the Shell,” which is sort of a piece about exactly how this film got funded. The classic 1995 anime feature Ghost in the Shell, how it got funded partly by Western backers, how it became a phenomenon in the West, and the odd cross-pollination there that happened.
Awesome. I'll be sure to link those up. Well, thanks again, man. I really appreciate it. It's been great to have you on. Where can folks find you, and where can they find your work?
They can find us at animationobsessive.substack.com. We also run social media profiles on Twitter and Blue Sky, animationobsessive, annie__obsessive. It's daily work. We put out two articles a week on Substack, and try to keep interesting posts up on social media.
Edited by Crystal Wang.
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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.
