Latvia’s ‘Flow’ Wins Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards

Flow, a formerly silent cat fable, received the Oscar award for best animated feature at the 97th Academy Awards held on Sunday. The win marks the first Academy Award for Gints Zilbalodis, who is a filmmaker from Latvia.

Flow was created through the program called Blender, a freely available animated software. The output is a strange combination of dreamlike visuals alongside a gentle, post apocalyptic tales of a cat, dog, capybara, lemur, and secretary bird that need to survive against overwhelming floods. The film does not contain a single piece of dialogue and completely captivates the audience through the outstanding interspecies connection that the animals have while trying to escape the flood.

This makes Zilbalodis only a second time animated film as a director.

“My mom and dad, my cats and dogs, thank you all. Thank you for the warm reception that our film has received. I’m really emotional right now. I hope this will be helpful for independent animation filmmakers around the world,” Zilbalodis said. ”This is the first time a film from Latvia has ever been nominated, so it actually means a lot. We are very inspired and we hope to come back very soon.”

The novel Zilbalodis’ Oscar contender, and now Winner, has managed to get through hand over heals this award season. The win on Sunday only adds to the new director's already impressive resume which consists of a best animated feature winat the Golden Globe Awards and his nominations from the Critics Choice Awards, Annie Awards, and British Academy Film Awards.

The success of the film is shared with the producers Matiss Kaza, Ron Dyens, and Gregory Zalcman The Latvian, French, and Belgian co-production was also nominated for best international featured film and it is the first Latvian film nominated at the Academy Awards.

It also surpassed “The Wild Robot” and “Inside Out 2” which was Disney’s top-earning movie last year along with Claymation “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” and “Memoir of a Snail.”

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