‘Flow’ Wins Best Animated Feature Oscar, the First Indie Film to Do So
It’s always a pleasure to see a film taht IndieWire has been championing from the very beginning triumph at the Oscars, and now the little cat that could has done just that. “Flow” has won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, becoming the first indie film ever to win in this category. The Sideshow and Janus Films release by filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis has enchanted just about everyone who’s seen it, and we raved about it since it premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May 2024, saying in a Critic’s Pick “A” review that it was “one of the most groundbreaking animated films about nature since ‘Bambi.'”
IndieWire eventually picked “Flow” as the best animated film of the year — the highest ranked animated film on our best movies of the year list — and we’ve spoken to the director about his process and broke the news that it’s entering the Criterion Collection later this year. In addition to winning Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, it received an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature, the only the second time an animated film has achieved this distinction. The first was 2021’s “Flee.”
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“I’m moved by the warm reception our win has had and I hope that it will open a lot of doors to independent animation filmmakers around the world,” Zilbalodis said in his speech. “This is the first time a film from Latvia has ever been nominated so it truly means a lot for us,” he says. “We are very inspired and we hope to be back soon. We are all in the same boat, we must overcome our differences and find ways to work together.”
After it won the Oscar, Conan O’Brien noted that it was the first time a film from Latvia has ever been nominated or won an Academy Award. “Ball’s in your court, Estonia,” the host quipped. After Paul Tazewell won the next award for Best Costume Design, and became the first Black man ever to achieve that honor, O’Brien had an epic non sequitur by repeating that joke: “Ball’s in your court, Estonia.”
“Flow,” entirely wordless, follows a cat as he navigates a world that’s suddenly without humans. A great flood washes over the land, and the cat has to learn to work together with a dog, a lemur, a capybara, and a secretarybird to survive in a boat. (This is why Zilbalodis, in his speech, stressed the importance of how all of us right now are “in the same boat.”) This is the kind of movie that, given that it’s dialogue-free, could make an impact in literally any country where it’s shown, and can mesmerize kids as well as adults. The character animation is of a truly superlative quality reminiscent of the Disney animators in the 1940s who used to study animals at length in learning how to draw them.
But it can’t be stated enough: This is the first indie film to win Best Animated Feature. Even Aardman’s “Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which won the Oscar in 2006, was associated with DreamWorks. Studio Ghibli, which won the category with “Spirited Away” and “The Boy and the Heron,” is by any standard a full studio as well — compared to Zilbalodis hiring recent graduates who specialize in animation to make the entirety of “Flow” for under 3.5 million Euros and then finding distribution after the fact by Sideshow and Janus Films. The film had such a tight budget, Zilbalodis told IndieWire at the Globes red carpet that it has no deleted scenes — everything he and his team animated is in the film. There was no room or budget for extraneous effort.
“Flow” immediately followed up its Cannes premiere by winning four awards at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, then by winning Best Animated Film at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Circle Awards, National Board of Review, and the Golden Globes, and then Best Independent Animated Film at the Annie Awards, and Best International Film at the Film Independent Spirit Awards.
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