appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

isVideo

articlePageQuery

article

articleSchemaContent

content

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

hooksArticlePageFloatingButtonConfigArticle

appConfig

filter

json

liveArticle

James Mottram

When director Gints Zilbalodis accepted his Oscar last month for his ethereal new animated film Flow, he thanked his parents and his “cats and dogs” – fitting, given that the charming cartoon follows a feline and other animals as they survive a huge flood.
Then he added a rallying cry for the industry: “I’m really moved by the warm reception our film has had … and I hope that it will open doors to independent animation filmmakers around the world.”
Flow’s success in beating huge American studio animations like Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot to the Academy Award, and the Golden Globe back in January, will surely be encouraging to other animators outside Hollywood.
Made in Latvia for US$3.7 million (HK$28.8 million), Flow has grossed over 10 times that in ticket sales to date. Perhaps it helps that the dialogue-free fable transcends language barriers, but it is almost impossible to imagine Pixar or DreamWorks creating something this mystical.


Without realising it, Zilbalodis may already have his wish, for 2025 seems to be the year of independent animation.
Flow’s fellow Oscar nominee Memoir of a Snail is a melancholic masterpiece, the Australian-made tale of Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook) and Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), twins living in 1970s Melbourne who are separated after being orphaned.
In that film, black humour – jokes about swingers and nudism – mixes with bleaker nods to real-world issues including Alzheimer’s disease and religious fundamentalism.
As director Adam Elliot recently told UK newspaper The Guardian, animation isn’t just about happy endings: “Why does everything have to be Disney?”


That is something with which Michel Hazanavicius would probably agree. The Oscar-winning director of silent comedy The Artist has just made his first animated film, The Most Precious of Cargoes, based on a 2019 novella by Jean-Claude Grumberg.
A fable set during the Holocaust, it tells of a Polish woodcutter and his wife who rescue an infant thrown from a train bound for the German Nazi regime’s Auschwitz concentration camp.
Hazanavicius could have shot a live-action story, but felt animation was a more honest approach. “It’s because of what is out of the frame,” he says.
“I know there’s a crew. I know these people [the actors] are not on their way to the death camps. I know if they are cold, there’s covers and catering and everything. I know they are pretending. I know they are lying.
“Drawings, they do not lie. There’s nothing out of frame. They are just here to [evoke] and to suggest what happened.”

Of course, animated films aimed at an adult audience are hardly new, from the surrealism of Jan Svankmajer and the work of Ralph Bakshi – notably his take on Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat – to the mastery of Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki.
Like Hazanavicius’ evocation of the Holocaust – with its train filled with ghostly faces – the most harrowing of subjects can be potently conveyed using the medium.
Think, for example, of the 1986 adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, the story of an ageing English couple dealing with the radioactive fallout from a nuclear attack.
Yet this century has seen adult animation in cinemas fall from favour – with the occasional outlier, like Waltz with Bashir (2008) about the 1982 Lebanon war, or Persepolis (2007), which recounts an Iranian girl’s upbringing in the Islamic Revolution.


Usually, it is television – and such long-running American shows as South Park and The Simpsons – that has been left to use the form provocatively. But films like Flow, Memoir of a Snail and The Most Precious of Cargoes are proof that the medium is once again fighting off the Hollywood hegemony.
Zilbalodis is the perfect example of how animation does not have to be a corporate enterprise. His short films and his 2019 debut, Away, about a boy and a bird journeying from a strange island, were all done by hand.
“On my previous films, I did everything myself,” he says. While he kept the same freedoms, Flow was made using a small team; at any one point, he had five animators in his studio in Latvia, and a further 18 animators in Belgium and France.
Even so, that is a tiny number compared with how many work on American studio animations scripted by committee.
It was Zilbalodis’ first time working with others – a reflection of the story, which sees the unnamed black cat team up to survive the flood.
“It was quite deliberate to tell this personal story,” he says. “Actually, I wrote the story before I had worked with the team, so I was really anticipating a lot of conflict and drama. But the actual process was a lot more smooth than we see in the film.”


Similarly, Michel Gondry is putting the emphasis back on homespun animation.
In his new feature Maya, Give Me a Title, the French director behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind creates a series of absurdist fantasy-driven stories based on titles given to him by his young daughter Maya – such as “Maya in the Sea with a Bottle of Ketchup”, in which a young girl tries to prevent the condiment contaminating the world’s oceans.
Adding to the charm, these are visualised via colourful paper-cut-out animation, a technique dating back to Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving animated feature film.
Gondry has frequently turned to animation, from his delightful video for The White Stripes’ single “Fell in Love With a Girl”, with the two-piece band rendered in Lego form, to his 2013 documentary about intellectual and political activist Noam Chomsky, Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?
You sense he is at his happiest when animating.

“A drawing is just a drawing,” he says. “If you want to make it move, you have to take it with your hand, but when you animate it, you take a picture, and it moves on its own. So it’s like magic. Each time I do it, I have the same feeling.”
That mysterious, magical feeling is also present in the work of Stephen and Timothy Quay, the Svankmajer-influenced animators who came to the fore in 1986 with their stop-motion short film using puppets, Street of Crocodiles.
Their latest work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a bewildering mix of live action and animation based on stories by surrealist Polish writer Bruno Schulz, was animated by them alone, off and on, for almost a decade.
“We always knew that we were going to come back to it to make it richer,” they told this writer recently. “We never gave up on it.”


At 77 years old, they are arguably the grandaddies of indie animation – although for them it was always about finding a medium with their limited means that helped the realise their fantastical imaginations.
“We’d have full control. Everybody would leave us alone … so we can operate on very minimal budgets,” they said.
Finally, it seems American animations are not the only ’toons in town.
Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook


Style Edit: YDC 2026 spotlights Hong Kong’s fashion trailblazers

Venice 2026: 10 of the festival’s best movies, from Woman Unknown to Possible Love and Musk

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom movie review – Aardman’s hilarious horror spoof

‘Woman Unknown’ wins Gold Lion at Venice Film Festival

European cinema

How independent animated films like Oscar winner Flow are taking on Pixar and DreamWorks

A screen grab from Flow, the Oscar-winning animation from independent director Gints Zilbalodis.  

A screen grab from Flow, the Oscar-winning animated film from independent director Gints Zilbalodis. Films like his are challenging the lavishly funded animated productions of Hollywood studios. 

A screen grab from The Most Precious of Cargoes.

A screen grab from Maya, Give Me a Title. Photo: Partizan Films

Hong Kong International Film Festival 2025 highlights: 12 must-see movies and programmes

Anthony Wong Chau-sang in a still from Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Lam Suet in a still from PTU (2003), one of four newly restored classic films screening in the Pan-Chinese Cinema programme at the Hong Kong International Film Festival 2025.

Hidetoshi Nishijima in a still from The Brightest Sun.

Natalie Hsu (left) and Fish Liew in a still from Pavane for an Infant.

Fernanda Torres in a still from I’m Still Here.

Vic Carmen Sonne in a still from The Girl with the Needle.

A still from Cadet.

A still from Chain Reactions.

Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in a still from Megalopolis.

A still from Kneecap.

A still from Seven Samurai (1954).

Tony Leung Chiu-wai in a still from My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (1989).

Sakura Ando (front) in a still from 100 Yen Love (2014).

15 new Hollywood movies to watch in spring 2025 from Black Bag to How To Train Your Dragon

Cate Blanchett in a still from Black Bag. Photo: Instagram/jana7380

Mason Thamesas Hiccup with his Night Fury dragon, Toothless, in a still from the live-action animation remake How to Train Your Dragon, one of our Hollywood movies to watch in spring 2025. Photo: Universal Pictures

Why can’t The Avengers directors Russo Brothers repeat their success outside the MCU?

(From left) Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and Ke Huy Quan in a still from The Electric State. Photo: Paul Abell/Netflix.

Filmmakers Joe Russo (left) and Anthony Russo at the premiere of The Electric State on February 24, 2025, at The Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. Photo: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Scarlett Johansson (left) and Chris Evans in a still from Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Photo: Marvel Studios

(From left) Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and Ke Huy Quan in a still from The Electric State. Photo: Paul Abell/Netflix

Ryan Gosling in a still from The Gray Man. Photo: Netflix

Golshifteh Farahani and Chris Hemsworth in a still from Extraction 2. Photo: Jasin Boland/Netflix

Suhail Dabbach in a still from Mosul.

(From left) Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Robert Downey Jnr, Chris Evans, Karen Gillan, the character Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Paul Rudd and Scarlett Johansson in a still from Avengers: Endgame. Photo: Disney/Marvel Studios via AP

Joe Russo (left) and Anthony Russo at the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood, California. Photo: Getty Images via AFP

Cecilia Cheung: Hong Kong actress, sex scandal victim and Chinese social media star

Cecilia Cheung at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards in 2004. The actress’ personal life garnered a lot of attention in the 2000s, with tabloids covering scandals and her high-profile romantic life. Photo: SCMP

Cheung in 1999. Photo: Oliver Tsang

Cheung speaks after receiving the award for best new performer, as veteran actors Liza Wang and Danny Lee look on, at the 19th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2000. Photo: Martin Chan

Cheung and Nicholas Tse in 2001. Photo: Reuters

Cheung in a still from Lost in Time (2003), for which she won best actress at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards. Photo: China Star Entertainment Group

Cheung and Tse at the 30th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2011, the year they filed for divorce. Photo: K. Y. Cheng

Cheung and Stephen Chow in a still from King of Comedy (1999). Her feature-film debut remains one of her most memorable roles. Photo: The Star Overseas

Cheung and her three sons. Photo: Weibo

Cheung in a photo she posted on her Weibo account in 2023. Photo: Weibo

Lifestyle

Entertainment

Culture

Film & TV

Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, is part of a wave of non-Hollywood animated films telling hard-hitting stories aimed at adult audiences


Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, is part of a wave of non-Hollywood animated films telling hard-hitting stories aimed at adult audiences.


How independent animated films like Oscar winner Flow are taking on Pixar and DreamWorks

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, is part of a wave of non-Hollywood animated films telling hard-hitting stories aimed at adult audiences

Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, is part of a wave of non-Hollywood animated films telling hard-hitting stories aimed at adult audiences