Flow: How A Latvian Cat Animation Beat Pixar And DreamWorks At The Oscars

There were 23 acceptance speeches delivered by Oscar winners at the 97th Academy Awards last night — but only one in which animals got a shout-out. In accepting his Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, Gints Zilbalodis, Latvian director of Flow, listed the people he wanted to thank: the Academy, the film’s distributors Sideshow and Janus, his parents, the free open-source software Blender used to make the film — and “my cats and dogs”.

Like the now Oscar-winning film itself, the speech was funny and moving, and had animals at its heart. But amongst the warm-and-fuzzy-ness of it all, it shouldn’t be ignored just how significant this moment is. Flow — a gorgeous, melancholic, philosophical fantasy about five animals learning to work together on a Noah’s Ark-esque boat in the middle of an aquatic apocalypse — is the little movie that could. It was born of an incredibly modest production, made by barely more than 40 people, between teams in Latvia, France and Belgium, on a shoestring budget — $3.5million, or, to put it into perspective, roughly 1.75 per cent of the reported $200m budget of fellow nominee Inside Out 2.

It is — pun intended — a sea-change of a win. This is a category at the Oscars where indie films are rarely even nominated. Since being introduced in 2002, the Best Animated Feature category has been dominated by Pixar, who have won an astonishing 11 times; during their noughties heyday, the studio won four years in a row, leading some to dismiss the category as the ‘Oscar for Best Pixar Film.’ Few other studios have had a look in. Pixar’s Disney stablemates, Walt Disney Animation, has won four times; Japan’s Studio Ghibli has won twice. No other studios — including DreamWorks, Aardman, Netflix, Warner Bros and Paramount — have ever won more than once. And no genuinely independently-made film has ever triumphed in the category — until now.

It’s rare, too, for any film outside of the Anglosphere to make a significant dent at the Oscars. To its great advantage, Flow has no spoken dialogue — just meows, barks, woofs, grunts, squeaks, squeals, snores, and various other animal utterances, which has given it a universal appeal, its artfulness and sense of wonder travelling easily across borders. Just witness the international popularity it has gained like a steamroller in the past few months of awards season, picking up awards in its home country of Latvia, France, Mexico, Canada, Spain, Switzerland, and now the United States.

Just as Parasite’s sweep in 2019 —  the first non-English language film to win Best Picture — felt revolutionary and radical for the often staid and safe Oscars, this feels like a glass ceiling being smashed, reflecting a more international, diverse, tasteful voting body.

Which is not to deny the film’s Latvian roots, of course. It is a huge point of pride for Zilbalodis’s home turf. As the filmmaker acknowledged in his speech, this was the first time a film from Latvia has even been nominated, let alone dared to dream of winning. It is now the most popular film ever released in its native country in terms of ticket sales, and Zilbalodis and his team have become instant national treasures. A statue of the cat from the film has been installed in the capital city of Riga, Zilbalodis has been named ‘Riga Citizen of the Year’, and the Golden Globe that the film won went on display at the Latvian National Museum of Art, where thousands of people queued for over an hour, just to catch a glimpse of the trophy. (Naturally, it was flanked by two statues of the cat.)

Flow’s win promises great things for the burgeoning film industry in its home country, which has a population (1.9 million) roughly half that of Los Angeles. Already, the Latvian government has promised a major boost in state funding to support locally produced animation, as well as financial grants to Flow’s filmmakers for their next project. In his speech, Zilbalodis hoped that the award “will open doors to independent animation filmmakers around the world”, and this is exactly the sort of tangible, real-world impact that major awards can have on filmmaking: shining a spotlight on independent artists, raising profiles, and encouraging much-needed funding from bean-counters for this kind of expensive, time-consuming, labour-intensive filmmaking.

That’s a big part of why Flow’s win feels so historic. Just as Parasite’s sweep in 2019 —  the first non-English language film to win Best Picture — felt revolutionary and radical for the often staid and safe Oscars, this feels like a glass ceiling being smashed, reflecting a more international, diverse, tasteful voting body. For a long time, animation was in danger of feeling like a side hustle in the industry, a medium ghettoised only for kids. There was, for a time, a rule in the Academy Awards which stated that the Best Animated Feature could not be awarded in a year in which fewer than eight eligible films were released. That rule has since been dropped. Animation is in rude health — it is “not a genre, because it is cinema”, as former Best Animated Feature winner Guillermo Del Toro has repeatedly argued — and the breadth and diversity of the films being produced now is remarkable. Flow is massively indicative of that. Just look at what else has been produced in only the past 12 months: Japan’s The Colors Within, Britain’s Kensuke’s Kingdom, France’s A Boat In The Garden, America’s Orion And The Dark, not to mention Flow’s fellow nominees The Wild Robot, Memoir Of A Snail, and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. It is an embarrassment of beautifully-drawn riches.

And, as Flow proves, the best animation transcends language and cultures, speaking to the widest possible audience. For a film without any humans in it, it is one of the most humane entries at this year’s ceremony. That, perhaps, is how it won the day. At the end of his acceptance speech, Zilbalodis nodded to his furry heroes, and the themes of community and cooperation that they represent: “We are all in the same boat,” he said, to huge applause in the Dolby Theatre. “We must overcome our differences and find ways to work together.” Even a cat is able to appreciate a message like that.