Flow: The Sound Engineer Was Made to Tickle Capybaras for the Golden Globes 2025 Winner for One Hell of a Reason

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The 2025 Golden Globes has been a medley of fantastic variety. But one of the most interesting choices came from Latvia whose entry for the animated films’ lineup — Flow — took home the Best Animated Feature award, and justifiably so. Directed by Gints Zilbalodis, Flow is a highly original and imaginative work that once again restores faith in the tired film industry.

Featuring a menagerie of animals in a plot resembling the apocalypse, the film brings in various species from across the board on a mission of survival. Despite calamitous adversities and animosity, these species come together in a time of need, sending a message of unity and hope.

The 2025 Golden Globes chose a worthy winner

Built on a framework of creative originality in its animated medium, Flow projects a feeling of extraordinary catharsis throughout the entire film. The Latvian project does not pull back from the fact that it is, in fact, not live-action but very much capable of building a computer graphics-rendered world filled with endless imagination.

In the meanwhile, Flow does not shy away from taking advantage of its simple design. The film’s writer and director do not choose to name their animals, simply calling them by the name of their respective species instead. Similarly, the film also does not contain any words, rather using the corresponding species’ animal sounds to construct their voice design instead of featuring dialogue and exposition.

The indie animation rose up against 2024’s biggest animated films, Inside Out 2 (which hauled over a billion dollars at the box office), Moana 2 (a widely anticipated sequel to a long-time audience favorite), and animation legend Chris Sanders’ film, The Wild Robot to take home the Best Animated Feature award in a worthy win (via Deadline).

Flow uses an ingenious trick in its sound design

During the filming of Flow, which was done entirely using the open-source software Blender, director Gints Zilbalodis fixated on a particular ingenious trick for the movie’s sound design. For dialogue in the film, no words were ever spoken, instead, sound engineer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas used the animals’ respective sounds.

In the case of the capybara, however, he ran into a little snag. Coïc-Gallas traveled down to a zoo, got into the capybara’s lair, and tickled the animal to make it yield. Unfortunately, all of that effort went to waste as the animal seemed to make a sound effect that did not match the personality of the film’s version.

In an interview with IndieWire, Coïc-Gallas revealed:

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. I found the sound of a baby camel and it worked.

Understandably, Coïc-Gallas and Zilbalodis had to resort to extreme measures to get the job done by getting the capybara’s tone just right. Despite finding the solution in another species, the personality of the capybara was captured perfectly well by using a baby camel in its place in the animated feature.

Flow is Latvia’s first official Golden Globe win. The film will appear on digital streaming platforms on January 7, 2025.

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