The cat, the snail and the robot: the new wave of indie animation

This March, there was rejoicing among animation fans and practitioners at an Oscar upset. The animated film Flow, directed by Latvia’s Gints Zilbalodis, won the Academy Award for best animated feature, beating Hollywood blockbusters by Pixar and DreamWorks. Flow is a flood fable without words or humans, telling the story of a small black cat who finds a family of other animals, from a capybara to a Labrador, on a boat on a deluged world.

Five months earlier, in October 2024, a very different animated feature won best film at the London Film Festival. Memoir of a Snail is a stop-motion tragicomedy by Australia’s Adam Elliot, about the tribulations of an orphaned girl, Grace, who takes solace in the snails she collects. There are echoes of dark fairytales, especially in a parallel plot about Grace’s twin Gilbert, adopted by an abusive religious family, but happy endings are not guaranteed.

Might these two successes herald a sea-change in animation? Both films are far more individual than most multiplex animation. Flow is both simple and cryptic, ending satisfyingly while leaving huge questions unanswered. (Even its post-credits moment can be taken multiple ways.) Memoir of a Snail is mordant and gnarly, absurd and heart-rending. Flow is suitable for children, Memoir decidedly not, though for all its gross-outs and dark nights of the soul it has more warmth and hope than much adult animation.

Of the two films, Flow seems likelier to influence mainstream studios, at least in principle. After all, it has analogies with a Pixar classic – the 2008 film Wall-E, which also had a post-cataclysmic setting and leading characters who don’t speak. But Flow reportedly cost under $5 million; Pixar’s films now cost 40 times that. Wall-E was made in Pixar’s halcyon days when its films were reliably hits, a time that’s now past. A bold concept like Flow’s might struggle to get a hearing.

The alternative hope is that the success of Flow and Memoir of a Snail could give a boost to the far smaller, independent creators and studios that make such films. As Memoir director Adam Elliot said plaintively in a recent Guardian article, “I’m trying to talk to the big studios – Netflix, Amazon, DreamWorks – and say, ‘Come on guys, be more generous. Carve out a little slice of [these studios’] budgets and invest in some independent auteurs.’”

The pessimistic reply, though, is that similar pleas have been made for decades. There have been remarkable ‘auteur’ animated features, with independent visions and tiny budgets, ever since Lotte Reiniger’s silent Arabian Nights fantasy The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Other historic landmarks include Jirí Trnka’s lovely stop-motion A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959), made in Czechoslovakia, and Bruno Bozzetto’s mischievous Allegro non Troppo (1976), a parodic tribute to Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

Neither Trnka’s nor Bozzetto’s film are officially available in the UK as of writing. That’s true of many of such films – for example, the gorgeous Brazilian fantasy Boy and the World (2013). Directed by Alê Abreu, it was nominated for the animated feature Oscar in 2016.

However, Boy and the World is distributed in the US by the company GKIDS, which has banged the drum for auteur animation since 2008. (GKIDS was acquired by Japan’s Toho last October, though that hopefully won’t affect its identity.) Some other films it handles don’t have UK editions either, such as Chicken for Linda! (2023), a splashy-coloured French comedy about a mother and daughter, and the harrowing Funan (2018), another French film, about Year Zero in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Thankfully, many other excellent auteur films can be purchased in Britain. They include two from 2023: Robot Dreams, a love story between a dog and a robot, and Britain’s Kensuke’s Kingdom, from Michael Morpurgo’s eco-themed adventure novel about a marooned boy. Meanwhile, the American animator Nina Paley releases her features free to the public domain. Seder-Masochism (2018), her feminist subversion of Moses and the Passover story, can be streamed on the website Catsuka.

Most of these films earn very little by Hollywood standards. Yet many auteur films are still profitable, given their tiny budgets. Flow was a breakout, earning $36 million worldwide by this February. But that still may not be enough to interest investors, except those with a true love of innovative animation.

The films find funding where they can. A long-established European networking venue is Cartoon Movie, an annual fair in Bordeaux each March where producers pitch to potential financiers. Meanwhile, Flow demonstrates how success breeds success, at least at a local level. In the wake of Flow’s triumph, the Latvian government allocated 1 million euros for animation projects, and 150,000 euros more for their marketing. These figures look laughably low from Hollywood, yet they may make a difference.

As Zilbalodis has pointed out, this is a field with no industry standard, no formula. Flow and Memoir of a Snail make that obvious. Flow uses CG, it has no dialogue, and was rated ‘U’ in Britain. In contrast, the stop-motion Memoir of a Snail is often carried by its heroine’s glum narration and it’s rated ‘15’ for strong sex references, nudity and domestic abuse.

Of course, some filmgoers will love both Flow and Memoirs of a Snail, and many of the other films in this article. It’s hard to judge, though, how many people follow auteur animation per se, and how many are just interested in their favourite creators: for example, in a venerated director such as France’s Sylvain Chomet, whose new film A Magnificent Life has just premiered at Cannes. Or a studio such as Ireland’s much-loved Cartoon Saloon (The Breadwinner, 2017; Wolfwalkers, 2020).

One might add Japan’s Studio Ghibli to the list… except some animation fans would grumble Ghibli’s pop-culture presence is so great it is part of the mainstream now. Certainly it has international imitators. 2024’s The Glassworker, the first hand-drawn animated feature from Pakistan, cleaves close to the Ghibli style, as the trailer shows.

But beyond creators to follow, auteur animation is large enough to have its own subgenres. A high proportion depicts real-world war or repressive regimes, boosted by two acclaimed films in the 2000s, Persepolis (2007) and Waltz with Bashir (2008), about conflict in the Middle East. Such films continue to pour out today.

The Glassworker is a fantasy, but it plainly references the India-Pakistan conflict. The Most Precious of Cargoes (2024) enfolds Holocaust imagery in the format of a dark fairytale, while Flee (2021) channelled the experiences of a refugee from Kabul. The genre has even seeped into Hollywood animation, with Disney’s musical Encanto (2021) referencing the conflicts in Colombia.

Another potential trend is towards surreal, hopeless horror, with much attention given to The Wolf House (2018), by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, and Mad God (2021) by Phil Tippett, both stop-motion films.

Then there are the truly avant-garde films that some connoisseurs, or cultists, pride as the purest forms of auteur animation. Recent specimens include the 2020 Polish film Kill It and Leave This Town by Mariusz Wilczyński, and the Quay Brothers’ Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglasss (2024), inspired by the novel by Bruno Schulz. The latter, though, is another film that seemingly has no official UK release as of writing.

It’s unlikely films such as these could ever be boosted by the love given to relatively mainstream fare such as Flow and Memoir of a Snail. But there are strong early notices for the wordless new French-Belgian feature Dandelion’s Odyssey, about the space journey of four dandelion seeds. Might this quartet achieve the same breakout success as the seafaring animals in Flow?

Memoir of a Snail is available to stream on BFI Player now.