It was a strong year for Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations, and an underdog triumphed. At the 97th annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles last night, Flow beat competition from Pixar's Inside Out 2, DreamWorks' The Wild Robot and Aardman's Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
Gints Zilbalodis tale about a cat in a flooded world missed out on the Oscar for Best International Feature Film but still became Latvia's first Oscar win. And it was surely also the first Oscar winner to be made entirely in the free 3D modelling software Blender, cementing the open-source program's place among the best animation software.
There was a time when it was hard to imagine the Oscars animation categories without at least a nomination for Disney. The studio has won Best Animated Feature four times and has been nominated 13 times (not including Pixar films). But the 2025 Oscars were the third year in a row that Disney had no direct nomination, although its subsidiary Pixar was in the running with Inside Out 2.
Flow's victory continues a trend for more interesting and diverse animation Oscar wins in recent years. It follows on the heels of Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio in 2023 and Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron in 2024. Another underdog, the stop-motion film Memoir of a Snail, was the fifth title in this year's list of nominations.
It was a well-deserved win for Flow (Straume in Latvian). The film is a surprisingly peaceful post-apocalyptic tale about a black cat, dog, capybara, ring-tailed lemur and secretary bird trying to survive a flood. It has no dialogue, instead allowing its expressive artistic style to do the talking, and the almost painterly style of animation is beautiful.
Flow was one of our highlights of Annecy 2024, and it still seems incredible that it was made by a small team using Blender alone. It was rendered in EEVEE, Blender's realtime render engine.
Gints thanked Blender when accepting the award. Speaking to press afterwards, he said: "Any kid now has tools that are used to make now Academy Award-winning films, so I think we're going to see all kinds of exciting films being made from kids who might not have had a chance to do this before.
"And it's a great tool. It's not in any way a compromise. It's as good as anything else out there, and we're going to use it for my next film."
See our feature on how Gints used Blender to make Flow. We also have a general roundup of Blender tutorials.
Meanwhile, Iranian filmmakers Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi earned the Oscar for Best Animated Short with In the Shadow of the Cypress. The tale of the relationship between an old captain with PTSD and his daughter, it was the second Iranian animated or live-action short film nominated at the Oscars and the first to win.
Dune Part 2 (Warner Bros – Paul Lambert, Stephen James, Rhys Salcombe, Gerd Nefzer) scooped the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and the best Costume Design Oscar went to Paul Tazewell for Wicked.
