The Pixar Camera

On 'Flow,' the Oscars and early CG animation.

A still from Flow (2024)

Welcome! We’re here with a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and this one is all about the art of cinematography.

This coming Sunday, the Oscars will reveal the winner of the animated feature race. It’s hard to call in 2025. There are big movies up from Pixar and DreamWorks, and yet the awards-season momentum belongs to Flow, a tiny film from Europe.

The difference in scale can’t be overstated. Inside Out 2’s production costs were 50 times higher than Flow’s, and it earned some 85 times more in theaters. Until the Nezha 2 situation, Pixar held the box-office record in animation with this film.

That could give the studio an edge with the Academy this year. But Pixar also has something going against it. To many in Hollywood, Flow feels new. It’s wordless, and its plot is simple, but it’s thrilling and moving anyway. And it doesn’t look like animation usually looks.

That last difference only partly comes down to its visual style. More important is its cinematography. Flow isn’t shot like most animation: the camera roams and wanders everywhere, often in long takes that can run for minutes. It feels a bit documentary-like — but also unreal. The camera shows us things that actual cameras can’t.

Director Gints Zilbalodis pulls a lot from live-action camerawork — he’s cited the immersive long takes of I Am Cuba (1964) as an influence. But video games are key for him, too. With his first feature, Away (2019), he admitted to using Shadow of the Colossus and Journey as reference points. In Flow, you sense them again.

Speaking to Letterboxd about his new film, Zilbalodis said:

The camera was more influenced by live-action films with these long, long shots and wide-angle lenses, which you also see in video games. You don’t see conventional coverage with close-ups and wide shots — you see this wide-angle lens following the characters, and this allows the audience to look around themselves and decide what to look at within the frame. I wanted to do that: you can look at the main story, you can look at the cat, but there are certain things hidden in the backgrounds.¹

This isn’t how Pixar movies are shot. Even today, the studio’s camerawork and staging feel traditional — in a 20th-century Hollywood way. And it’s not an accident: the style works for CG animation. Pixar knows that better than anyone, because Pixar pioneered the idea.

A moment from Flow