On March 2, a cat made Oscars history. Best Animated Feature did not go to Pixar’s Inside Out 2, the highest-grossing animated film of all time (which still resulted in layoffs). Nor did it go to the other “favorite,” DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot. Instead, the award went to Flow: an independent, dialogue-less Latvian film made with open-source software.
Flow follows an unnamed cat during a mysterious, semi-magical apocalyptic event, as a world where humans seem to have disappeared suffers torrential flooding. It’s a beautiful, moving film that deserves every ounce of recognition that it’s getting.
However, giving the Oscar for Best Animated Feature to a melancholy film that refuses straightforward interpretation is a huge departure for the Academy—a body that, until recently, seemed cemented in the belief that animation is children’s media.
Changing tides for animation
When Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars in 2023, del Toro used his speech to make an impassioned plea on behalf of the medium: “Animation is cinema. Animation is not a genre. Animation is ready to be taken to the next step. We are all ready for it. Keep animation in the conversation.”
del Toro was addressing how, within the Academy and America’s TV and film industry itself, animation is considered a vehicle for children’s entertainment, nothing more. A practical example: as I watched Studio Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service on Max just last week, I was bombarded with ads for Max’s original early childhood animated shows.
That kind of bias historically shows within both the nominees and winners of the Oscars’ Best Animated Feature as well. Between the category’s inception in 2001 and 2023, the only winners not made by Disney, Pixar, or DreamWorks are Spirited Away (2002), Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), Happy Feet (2006), Rango (2011), and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). And Happy Feet and Rango are still “kids movies” made by major American studios (Warner Bros. and Paramount, respectively).
But then Pinocchio won in 2023. That win was followed up by The Boy and the Heron in 2024—a film with a clear precedent, thanks to director Hayao Miyazaki’s previous win with Spirited Away, but that is still more nonlinear, metaphorical, and “adult” than even the average Ghibli film. Now, that streak continues for a third year with Flow.
While all three films are not not for kids, the consecutive wins signal that perhaps the Academy listened to del Toro’s speech. Pinocchio, The Boy and the Heron, and Flow all embrace more mature avenues of storytelling. Perhaps, more importantly, they all free the category from its preoccupation with major American studios.
Empowering animation
Flow‘s win is historic in many, many ways. For one, it’s the first time a Latvian film has ever won an Oscar. This is such a big deal that the country’s president not only posted about the win to X, but the Oscar itself was also quickly displayed at the Latvian Museum of Art. According to Flow‘s director, Gints Zilbalodis (who just turned 30), people are waiting in line for over an hour to see the Oscar.
However, Flow‘s victory also marks multiple huge landmarks for animation itself. Flow is the first independent film ever to win Best Animated Feature. Considering that the American animation industry is imploding so thoroughly that storied creators are turning to indie productions for their next projects (rather than literally Disney), this is an important milestone.
Flow‘s budget was $3.7 million. By contrast, Inside Out 2‘s budget was around $200 million—and 14% of Pixar’s workforce was laid off immediately after production. Additionally, Flow was made in Blender, a free and open-source animation program.
For so long, major production companies like Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks have been the gatekeepers of American animation, and the Oscars have upheld their reign. But as of the last few years, the end of that reign could be in sight. And that’s not something to mourn: the possibilities of independent and foreign-produced animation shine bright. It just took a Latvian film about a cat to show us the way.
