An animated Oscar favorite that revitalized an entire country’s film industry floats to the top on streaming

There was once a time where The Wild Robot — Chris Sanders’ juggernaut of a DreamWorks flick — seemed like a lock for the Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 97th Academy Award. But then Flow caught the attention of the wider world, drowning The Wild Robot‘s hopes and dreams in a biblical flood of artistic prowess.

Gints Zilbalodis’ feature already nabbed the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film, and is among the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature Film. It has since emerged as a point of national pride for its native Latvia, with a commemorative statue having been built in the capital city of Riga, Zildalodis being awarded the 2024 “Riga Citizen of the Year” honor, and the Latvian film industry receiving renewed investment on of Flow‘s success. All this, and it’s also the current king of Max.

Per We Live in Time, third place).

Flow follows the odyssey of a standoffish black cat, whose home is destroyed by a great flood, and who finds refuge on a wandering sailboat driven by a capybara. As more and more animals them on their voyage, they must set aside their differences and peacefully coexist if they want to survive in this new world — one as lush and beautiful as it is unfamiliar.

Flow was created entirely with the free 3D computer graphics software Blender, and took Zildalodis and his team five years to create. That’s a herculean feat on its own, but to also render a supremely evocative story without any dialogue? It’s no wonder Flow has been shown the love it has.

Beyond the genius of using various animals — complete with their instincts and capabilities — to parallel the diversity of human beings, Flow‘s visual execution stands as a key testament to Zildalodis’ artistic discipline.

When working with an animated frame, you become aware of just how much control you have over what appears on the screen. You’re not just capturing images with a camera; you’re painting directly from your imagination. This, of course, allows for more visual freedom, but any artist will tell you that constrictions are one of the greatest and most important tools in the field of creativity.

And yet, Zildalodis takes this animated frame and, rather than try to play with possibility for the sake of possibility, commits to rendering this adventure as cinematically as possible. Flow is an animated film that’s shot like a live-action one, and the breathtaking quality of that motion is second only to the pixel-perfect animation itself. Indeed, Flow is decidedly one of the great movies of this decade in of presentation, technical innovation, and storytelling. Latvia, you made one heck of an Academy Awards debut with this one.