What is Flow, the animated indie movie that beat Disney to the Golden Globe?

Inside Out 2 was the highest-grossing movie of the year, but it lost out at the Golden Globes to a dialogue-free Latvian animation about a black cat.

Flow won Best Animated Feature at the Golden Globes in a big upset. (Curzon)
Flow won Best Animated Feature at the Golden Globes in a big upset. (Curzon)

One of the biggest surprises of this year's Golden Globes came in the Best Animated Feature category. Rather than an enormous Disney hit, the award went to Flow — a dialogue-free, independent animation from Latvia.

Flow's win is all the more impressive because it's not as if this was a particularly lean year for animation at the Globes. The category contained two mammoth Disney movies in the shape of Pixar sequel Inside Out 2 — the highest-grossing film of 2024 — and song-and-dance sequel Moana 2, which is closing in on the billion-dollar mark worldwide.

Even away from Disney, the category also included emotionally potent DreamWorks hit The Wild Robot, the triumphant return of Wallace and Gromit for Vengeance Most Fowl, and the dark stop-motion story Memoir of a Snail. So how did Flow rise to the top?

Flow tells a story of animals working together to survive an apocalyptic flood. (Curzon)
Flow tells a story of animals working together to survive an apocalyptic flood. (Curzon)

Directed and co-written by Gints Zilbalodis, Flow is an inventive and emotional adventure story about a cat trying to survive when its home is ravaged by a near-biblical flood. The cat jumps on a sailboat for safety and, over the course of the film, is joined by various other animals. Just like its fellow nominee The Wild Robot, it's a fantastical story with a resonant eco-parable undertone to it.

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These aren't anthropomorphised, talking Disney animals. They only communicate via animal noises — in most cases provided by the real animals depicted. The exception is the capybara character, whose noises are actually provided by a baby camel.

Read more: Flow Is the Perfect Movie for Animation Fans, Animal Lovers, and Environmental Doomsayers (Rolling Stone, 5 min read)

The movie, which was made without major studio backing and rendered using the open source graphics program Blender, has been embraced by critics. It could even end up competing on multiple fronts at the Oscars, as it's Latvia's official entry for the Best International Feature category. It's the first time the country's entry has made the 15-film shortlist.

Ron Dyens, Gints Zilbalodis, and Matiss Kaza won at the Golden Globes for Flow. (Penske Media/Getty)
Ron Dyens, Gints Zilbalodis, and Matiss Kaza won at the Golden Globes for Flow. (Penske Media/Getty)

Flow stands out as something truly unique in a category that, far too often, rewards very similar films each year. There is a sense, though, that the tide is turning a little. The last two winners at both the Oscars and the Globes were Studio Ghibli's The Boy and the Heron and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio — Netflix's innovative stop-motion take on the classic story. The days of Disney domination may well be over.

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