Dialogue-free animation is entering a new golden age

From its inception in 1908 with Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie, film animation has always been a medium that esteems the conveyance of visuals, by its very definition. As animation as we know it has evolved in its 116 years of official existence, animators have consistently used the medium as an incubator for experimentation—to play with the alchemy of how you can tell stories. The purest pursuit of the medium, dialogue-free animation, goes back to this origin. But the modern commercialization of animated feature production has meant studios and executives have been less generous in letting animators pare back the chatter, and just show the story.

That makes this decade’s relative spate of mainstream, dialogue-free or dialogue-lite animation a surprising delight; we might even deem it a mini golden age of dialogue-free storytelling. The format featuring the most creative freedom—animated short films—is influencing more mainstream projects, like Kirsten Lepore’s I Am Groot series for Marvel Studios. Legends in the field, like independent filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt, are still making magic in the format. Hertzfeldt’s latest short, ME, is an experimental, non-dialogue musical about narcissism. Genndy Tartakovsky went feral with his bloody, elegant Adult Swim series Primal. Even recent feature films have bucked the norms and triumphed: Pablo Berger’s Oscar-nominated Robot Dreams, large sections of DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot and Netflix’s upcoming Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow (out this week) all eschew dialogue.

For a form that has such a long and rich history, literally built upon the bedrock idea of encouraging unfettered imagination to be transformed into moving images, the slow march by mainstream studios to shoehorn animation into formulaic and tired templates like the rest of the industry is depressing. And yet it’s no question that, in an abysmal development year in Hollywood, feature animation has been one the most successful sectors. So why is animation being discouraged from leaning into the very thing it’s long succeeded at? In theory, including less dialogue in a mainstream animated film helps distributors sell it to international audiences who won’t have to contend with a language barrier. A visually-led story is more accessible by all standards. But consistently, up through November of this year, the highest grossing animated films commissioned by studios and streamers remain very, very chatty. 

“If I’m a distributor with an international film on my hands, I’m going to sleep a little easier at night if it doesn’t have any dialogue in it,” Don Hertzfeldt tells The A.V. Club.

“As cinema becomes more and more globalized, anything without dialogue is going to be a much easier sell across borders,” he continues. “In the silent film era, we were a nation of immigrants fresh off the boat with cities full of different communities who couldn’t speak the same language. But anyone could go buy a ticket and understand Charlie Chaplin. For the same reason, a film today that has no language barrier will probably have a better chance internationally. And every time I see a Miyazaki film, I wish I could speak Japanese.”

For two decades, Hertzfeldt has built a knockout portfolio of inventive and thought-provoking films that consistently win piles of awards and the admiration of his peers. From 2000’s seminal Rejected to the recent World Of Tomorrow series of shorts, Hertzfeldt goes where his imagination takes him, and the audience follows.

In ME, Hertzfeldt returns to dialogue-free storytelling and tells The A.V. Club that it was all about rising to the challenge of a self-imposed creative exercise. “Most of my movies are full of characters who won’t shut up,” he said. “I sometimes think that I’m a writer above all else, but I also don’t like the idea of making the same film twice. ME was a good excuse to exercise some other muscles. My rules for ME were no dialogue, no written words on the screen, and no sound effects. Sometimes creative limitations, even when they’re self-inflicted, can make interesting things happen. I don’t agree with the idea that silent films are more ‘pure’ or anything, but there can definitely be something special about them—like watching a poem.”

An animator who has stayed inside the studio system and been able to balance his own quest to challenge himself with the needs of his bankrollers is Genndy Tartakovsky. With his Hotel Transylvania trilogy for Sony Animation, he made mainstream comedies as reliant on dialogue as any. Yet on the smaller screen with Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, he’s been able to throw elbows at typical creative limitations and create series that don’t adhere to the typical animated series fare. But Tartakovsky’s work also gets eyes. His penchant for experimenting with dialogue-lite storytelling was fostered during the years making Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars, and is now showcased with Primal. However, even Tartakovsky isn’t immune from the industry; his upcoming R-rated film Fixed has been a victim of Warner Bros. Discovery cost-cutting, leaving Sony Animation alone to find a distributor.

Looking at the 2025 feature animation release slate, studios are doubling down with the safe choices they’ve been making, as more than 13 animated features are either sequels or based on existing IP. With the barriers to creativity getting taller, directors are getting creative within their boundaries, with some finding ways to intentionally animate sections of their films without any dialogue, or brazenly featuring silent characters of note. 

In Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot (based on the book of the same name by Peter Brown), the adventures of ROZZUM Unit 7134, AKA Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), lost on an island trying to integrate with the surrounding wildlife, provides multiple opportunities for sequences without the spoken word. In several of the film’s most emotional scenes, it’s solely up to the work of the animators and composer Kris Bowers to convey the shattering feelings involved as Roz raises the gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor). 

Bowers tells The A.V. Club that for his first animated film—and one that so frequently employed a non-traditional reliance on visuals and sound design—his score felt necessarily “fresh.”

“So often, music is asked to be in the background,” Bowers explains. “I’ve heard so many euphemisms like ‘wallpaper’ or ‘carpet,’ so it’s not noticed, which serves its purpose as well. But the thing that made me fall in love with the power of film music is when I realized I could sing the main theme to something by itself, and all of the feelings that come along with that movie are sparked. So, to have space to write melodies and write these [cues] that are unapologetically emotional and melodic, is really a huge joy for me.”

Aside from its energy and heart, Bower’s score is so effective because it works in tandem with the sequences where the dialogue drops out. His character-specific motifs add flourishes to what the animators put in the frame, and together they chart Roz’s growth from empty metal ball to devoted mother and “wild robot.”  

One of the greatest examples of a modern animation character that embodies the power of silence is the infamous criminal Feathers McGraw. The brilliantly sinister penguin (posing as a chicken) makes his long-anticipated return in the new Aardman Animation film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. 

Directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham resurrect one of stop-motion animation’s greatest villains, who was first introduced two decades ago in the short The Wrong Trousers. Operating like he was plucked directly out of an old-school noir, McGraw bowled over global audiences who could instantly understand his dastardly dealings.

At a recent AFI screening discussion for the film, Park said that McGraw became so beloved by audiences that it took him almost three decades to come up with an idea good enough to bring the character back. That itself is a measure of quality control underheard of in a cinematic ecosystem so focused on cranking out sequels. When they found the right scenario for McGraw, one with purpose and bite, Crossingham said they had to retrain all of the animators, old and new, as to why the character is so chillingly effective.

“The thing with Gromit, for example, is that people think he is so expressive and then they over-animate him,” Crossingham said. “When actually, it’s about doing the absolute bare minimum but making that as powerful as possible. And that translates even more to Feathers McGraw.”

“Animators are kind of motivated to move things,” he continues. “But Feathers McGraw is the most powerful when he hardly moves. And that is really, really difficult for an animator, when you say, ‘Just let him be,’ and they’re like, ‘Can’t I just move this?’ And we’re like, ‘No.’ It’s actually having the confidence to let the posing of the character be strong and to let us directors use the camera, use the music, use good filmmaking skills to make Feathers appear like he’s thinking and breathing. And that’s the hardest thing to do.”

Yet they do it brilliantly. In the climactic train scene in The Wrong Trousers, this animation economy surrounding McGraw is in full view. His menace, cheek, and intelligence are conveyed with a mere head tilt, wing flick, or perfectly timed blink. The animators double down on the minimalism in Vengeance Most Fowl with McGraw taking a small sip from his novelty mug after passionately tapping out the perfect organ cue to reiterate his nefarious convictions. Much like Bower’s work, the marriage of music and character is even stronger when the audience is allowed to connect with the emotion of the moment instead of being told what to think or feel by a character’s words.

Which brings us to Latvian animator/director Gints Zilbalodis, whose second animated feature film, Flow doesn’t have a lick of dialogue in its 84-minute runtime. Yet audiences around the globe are having no problems understanding the animal-led story about belonging and purpose. Already, Flow has won three awards at this year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival and the Jury Prize at the Animation Is Film Festival.

Zilbalodis started his animation career working as a one-man-band animator of shorts, then gained global attention for his 2019 feature debut Away. Conceived as a dialogue-free, surreal adventure story about a boy and an injured bird, Zilbalodis wrote, directed, scored, and animated the film using Maya.

With Flow, he’s no longer working solo, having established Dream Well Studio to tell another dialogue-free story, this time set in a world where catastrophic flooding has forced surviving animals—a black cat, a golden Labrador retriever, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur, and a secretary bird—to come together to survive the rising tide. 

“I’ve been asked if it’s a big challenge to make films without dialogue, but actually, for me, it would be a bigger challenge to tell stories with dialogue. It’s something I’m not used to, so that’s why I made all those short films without dialogue,” Zilbalodis tells The A.V. Club. “When I was about to make a feature, I wanted to stay in that area which I had known, and not do something too drastic for the first time.”

A big piece of Flow’s appeal is the sense of wonder Zilbalodis and his animators evoke from the non-verbal animal characters, and in kind, the audience, as collective observers to this seemingly global upheaval. Using the Blender software system this time around, Zilbalodis says his team’s aesthetic goal was to be as “naturalist” as possible with the landscapes and the characters. 

“I did want to have some of that graphic look where it’s not entirely hyperreal,” Zilbalodis explains. “But I did want to make it more immersive and have more detail, especially in the environments so that you feel like you are very close to these characters. The wind and the grass, you can sense that. And you can sense how wet the water is.”

“With the characters, it was important that they’re not hyperreal, because then you lose some of that expressiveness, and they’re less appealing,” he continues. “Because the characters are also less detailed, we’re projecting our own experiences on them, seeing our pets within these characters. It makes it a lot more emotional and engaging.”

Together, the effect is that the audience becomes more attuned to the animals’ behaviors, and that’s where the engagement and understanding of their individual personalities bloom. Our observations—and the score from Zilbalodis and Rihards Zalupe—tell us everything we need to know about this cast of disparate critters. 

And all this came from the success of Away, which emboldened Zilbalodis to get even more intentional when writing stories without dialogue. “Sometimes it’s good to have some limitations in animation, because you can do whatever you can think of in animation, basically. And it can be hard to begin when you have infinite possibilities. Having these limitations can be a good way to start the ball rolling, at least.”

Echoing Hertzfeldt, Zilbalodis also reiterates that Flow’s lack of dialogue has been one of its biggest strengths.

“Because of the lack of dialogue, it’s helped Flow reach as big an audience as it has, and it works all over the globe. It doesn’t need to be translated,” the Latvian animator said. “Hopefully, there’s more and more appetite [for films] without dialogue, because independent films are from different parts of the world. Hopefully, Flow will be successful, and if anything is successful, there’s more of that coming… probably.”

The success of these recent projects proves the adage that audiences are smarter than they’re given credit for. Animators are taking every opportunity, every bit of real estate they can in their projects, to lean into their artform in exciting ways. If these examples represent the dawn of a new golden age of dialogue-free animation, the industry at large should take note, see the connected elements, and embrace the proven potential. Audiences are certainly going along with it, money is to be made, and more importantly, the animation industry writ large can get back to telling stories in whatever way artists’ imaginations spur them.