‘Flow’ Doesn’t Have Dialogue — But Its Sound Design Speaks Volumes

Director Gints Zilbalodis and sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas tell IndieWire about maintaining the momentum of the animated animal adventure through sound.

“Flow” does not have any dialogue — at least none outside of the sounds made by its ragtag team of animals escaping a seemingly Biblical flood — but it’s far from a silent film. The massive challenge and gift that director Gints Zilbalodis gave to sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas was to provide that world as much weight, texture, and character as the animation does. 

It meant starting early, not just on the environments but by having conversations about filmmaking that put Coïc-Gallas and Zilbalodis on the same cinematic page. “I asked [Zilbalodis] what were your favorite movies? What are you expecting for sound? All that was helpful for me to understand,” Coïc-Gallas told IndieWire. 

The kind of movie Zilbalodis wanted to build was one where the audience could appreciate the spectacle while fully immersed in the action. This meant narrowing down the sheer amount of sounds in the world and strategically focusing on what would be most evocative. And Coïc-Gallas knew exactly where to look for inspiration on how to do that. 

“I love Jacques Tati, and [he] does exactly that,” Coïc-Gallas said. “You don’t hear everything. You choose one sound, then another sound; we made ‘Flow’ a bit like that. We chose sounds to create an emotion.” 

That was perfectly in line with Zilbaldos’ philosophy of how sound in the movie should reflect our experience of moving through the world with its soulful black cat protagonist — which is not the same as reflecting the experience of the world itself. “If you design everything exactly like [it sounds] real life, it would not feel real. It would take you out of the experience. Sometimes you need to be creative to make it feel more real,” Zilbalodis told IndieWire. 

Coïc-Gallas cited the ending as a prime example. As the landscape dramatically changes, with the earth opening up and trees and rocks and water all falling in, Coïc-Gallas focused the film’s sound on the crunches and crackle of the trees. “Because the sound of the trees is so powerful, it’s enough. And it’s like that all the way through the movie,” Coïc-Gallas said. “It’s an incredible present for a sound designer.” 

But Zilbalodis gave Coïc-Gallas another present, which was his work on the film’s score. The music in “Flow” acts as a true dance partner with the sound to amp up our sense of wonder and/or danger as the animals sail into each new environment. Zilbalodis composed about seven hours of music for the eventual 50 minutes of cues used in the finished film. 

“If I’d done the music later, the whole story might’ve been very different. It also allows me to not use temp music. I can just use [the cues I’m writing], so I create a lot of material, a lot of variations on the same theme,” Zilbalodis said. “So I have all these options and because I’m also editing the picture, I can tweak the edit to work with the music and go back and forth. Even if it’s not the same person doing the editing and the music, I think that the composer and the picture editor should really work together.” 

Coïc-Gallas could then take that edit and bring out sounds to give the action onscreen real heft and impact, and to maintain the characters’ momentum through space. Especially given that “Flow” has a couple of bravura long takes that would likely scare anyone (except perhaps Jacques Tati), injecting a sense of movement and pacing into the sound design was paramount. 

“There’s always movement. There’s absolutely no continuous sound. The birds are moving. The water is moving. Everything is moving around all the time,” Coïc-Gallas said. “And all the sound environments reflect the emotion of the cat.” 

When the cat finds a refuge to nap in an abandoned home, for instance, Coïc-Gallas sculpts the environment to be full of beautiful, safe-sounding natural sounds, birds, and insects, so what we hear is almost musical in its own right. “But when the cat is traveling away, the sound changes, and the backgrounds change. Sometimes they are mysterious, sometimes scary. Everything sounds natural, but the way that it is edited absolutely isn’t.” 

“I think the two of the longest shots, which are both almost five minutes long in their entirety, are driven by sound. There’s no music,” Zilbalodis said. “It required changing [the sound] to make them interesting for that length of time.” 

The fear of audience boredom certainly animated Coïc-Gallas to keep finding ways to shift our, and the cat’s, perspective of moving through the world and employ sound with incredible specificity. “[Zilbalodis knows] you can’t just ask for ‘wind,’ you have to ask for a wind with leaves. You are more specific because you’ve worked in a concrete way with sound,” Coïc-Gallas said to Zilbalodis. “The fact that you’ve done all the sound design and sound editing of your previous movie really was really helpful.” 

There was one aspect of the sound design of “Flow” that no amount of previous experience could be helpful for, though: coaxing sound out of animals to get all the noises and expressions that Coïc-Gallas needed. His own cat “went silent” for about two months as soon as a microphone started appearing around the house; the film’s chatty lemurs were only willing to make about three distinct sounds when recorded; and experiments in tickling a capybara did not yield sounds that felt true to the patient, sleepy older sibling figure that the character embodies in the movie. 

“I spent all day trying to record the capybara for nothing. So Gints heard the sound, and because Ginz is very polite, he didn’t shout about the sound of capybara, but it was terrible. So we tried to look for another sound in [sound libraries], and Gints had the idea of some camels,” Coïc-Gallas said. “I found the sound of a baby camel and it worked.” 

Although Coïc-Gallas regrets that he’s disappointing zookeepers everywhere with the final sound design for the animal characters in “Flow,” it was more important for the animals to be as expressive as the actions onscreen. That, more than a wall of sound or tricks with directionality, is what helps immerse viewers in the journey.

“You have to create movement so you don’t get too boring. You choose a specific sound that you put first and create a specific emotion. It’s a different way of editing sound from live-action because you don’t have to be real. In live-action, when you see a car passing, you do have to make the sound. But in animation, you don’t need that,” Coïc-Gallas. “You can do everything you want. It’s very free.”

“Flow” is in select theaters now and opens nationwide December 6.