Oscar nominee Gints Zilbalodis on the allure of capybaras, casting his sound editor’s cat, and including human voice actors in his next movie.
Photo: Courtesy of DreamWell Studio
Maybe the key to making a beloved movie is to tickle a few large rodents along the way. Working on the animated film Flow, Latvia’s first (and twice) Oscar-nominated movie, director Gints Zilbalodis and sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas discovered how many strident animal noises clash with their respectively cute exteriors. “We used real animal voices in Flow. In most cases this wasn’t a problem, except for the capybara,” Zilbalodis explained in a post on X. “We made a creative decision to offer the role to a baby camel instead.”
How…