Flow Needs to Release the Capybara Cut

Capybaras and silent film actors have a lot in common. While pleasant to look at on screen, their voices were… made for silent films. The team behind Flow, a Latvian animated movie about animals surviving in a post-human world, made the same realization when trying to maintain realism when recording the animal cast, which consisted of a cat, a dog, a lemur, and a bird. “We used real animal voices in Flow. In most cases this wasn’t a problem, except for the capybara. Capybaras don’t speak that much, so it had to be tickled to make it say something, but the voice was very high-pitched and didn’t fit our chill, hippy like character,” director Gints Zilbalodis explained in a post. “We made a creative decision to offer the role to a baby camel instead.”

Our sound designer Gurwal, just sent me a clip of the real capybara voice. I think that we made the right call to use a baby camel voice instead. pic.twitter.com/0HPu4eamNS

— Gints Zilbalodis (@gintszilbalodis) February 8, 2025

But in an alternate timeline, what would a capybaras sound like on the big screen? Zilbalodis shared a clip of a tickled capybara’s original take, where the beloved animal sounded more like a barking dog than a rodent. Zilbalodis added, “I think that we made the right call to use a baby camel voice instead.” Okay, sure, maybe. What if the little guy was just nervous? He should’ve gotten multiple chances to try again before getting replaced by a baby camel, even if they are equally as adorable. With the streaming release of Flow heading to Max on Valentine’s Day, is there an opportunity for an alternate cut with real capybaras? We hope so.

Related

• Flow Is an Animal Adventure That’s Endearing and a Little Too Pretty