If you loved the Oscar-winning animated masterpiece Flow, then a hotly anticipated video game adaptation about a stray cat is the movie for you. Flow, the latest winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, broke all the rules of animated films. It wasn’t produced by a big studio; it was a tiny indie production animated on the free open-source software Blender. It doesn’t have any dialogue; the entire story is told through its animal characters — and the animals actually act like real animals; they’re not anthropomorphized cartoon characters. 4y4m4b

Surprisingly (or not, depending on how you look at it), Flow took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year, cementing Disney's losing streak in recent years. The Best Animated Feature category has historically been dominated by the biggest animation studios in Hollywood, which typically turn out animated (and generally good) family films with broad appeal. However, more experimental, mature, and independent animated films have been on the rise.Flow is an entirely silent film, clocking in at only an hour and a half, and an international feature distributed by Janus Films and UFO Distribution.

The film Flow surprised everyone at the 2025 Oscars by winning best animated movie, setting a 24-year record when beating out The Wild Robot. The most anticipated event of the year for Hollywood is the Oscars, and those of us at Screen Rant are dedicated to providing viewers with play-by-play updates on the 2025 Oscars.

Flow is one of the most critically acclaimed movies of 2024, and here are the 10 best movies like it. Upon Flow's release in 2024, the Latvian animated adventure film immediately took off, with it being praised for its gorgeous animation, story, and lack of dialogue. Flow has been massively successful at film festivals, with it even being nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature Film at the 27th Academy Awards. Flow has garnered a massive fanbase, and here are 10 other films that fans of Flow need to see.

The Oscars ultimately snubbed anime at this year's awards, but one of its top nominees was actually inspired by Studio Ghibli. 2024 was a massive year for animation. However, when it came time for nominees to be announced for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, many voiced concern not one anime, including Look Back, was nominated. However, despite this major upset for anime fans, one of the animation frontrunners actually took a lot of inspiration from the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

Flow's streaming release date has been revealed. The Latvian animated movie, which was directed and co-written by Gints Zilbalodis, follows a cat teaming up with other animal species to survive after a devastating flood, has been well received across the board. Glowing Flow reviews have earned the movie a Certified Fresh 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it became the first Latvian movie to ever be nominated in a major ceremony when it received two Oscar nods, for Best International Feature and Best Animated Feature.

Last May, after five and a half years of work, Gints Zilbalodis’ computer-animated silent movie Flow was presented at the Cannes Film Festival. Now this unlikely project has a great chance of making Oscars history. Competing alongside behemoths like Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and the latest Wallace & Gromit movie in the Best Animated Feature category, Flow breaks new ground at the Academy Awards in more than one sense. Firstly, it was made for less than $4 million using the open-source animation software Blender. Secondly, it’s the ion project of independent Latvian filmmakers backed exclusively by European studios.

Gorgeous and critically-acclaimed animated films like The Wild Robot and Flow could break a longstanding precedent at the 97th Academy Awards. Established in 2001, the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature has highlighted some of the 21st century's best animated fare. However, the category has been largely dominated by a singular force in previous years, with the Academy having a clear affinity for the works produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios.

I was totally enchanted by Flow. I expected to like it, as I usually do sitting down to watch something; I hoped to be engaged by it, and maybe to wonder at it. But I wasn't prepared to be as moved by it as I was. It's become my favorite animated movie of the year, though I note with interest that it and my two other contenders, Robot Dreams and The Wild Robot, all feel like siblings in a Wittgensteinian family. Flow is the most experimental of the three, and also the most focused.