A Latvian animator, working with open source software and a small team, just managed to win an Oscar for his second feature, Flow.
Beneath all the wealth and glamour that underpins the ceremony, low-budget filmmaking was a constant theme at this year’s Oscars. Writer-director Sean Baker’s sex worker comedy drama, which won five awards, was made for $6m. The Brutalist told a sprawling period piece about a Holocaust survivor’s grand designs for less than $10m (it won three Oscars).
A Real Pain, writer-director and star Jesse Eisenberg’s drily witty comedy drama, which earned a Best Supporting Actor gong for Kieran Culkin, was produced for around $3m. It’s all a marked contrast to the previous year’s Academy Awards, with the evening dominated by Oppenheimer – Christopher Nolan’s $100m, studio-backed (and studiously told) drama about the creation of the atom bomb.
The most fascinating story at the 2025 Oscars, though, was surely Flow and its win for Best Animated Feature. A fantasy adventure about the progress of a disparate group of animals in what looks like a post-apocalyptic world, it’s the work of Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis and a small team of collaborators. Told without dialogue, Flow was made for a comparatively small budget of around $3.6m, with Zilbalodis’ fingerprints all over its storytelling – as well as director and co-writer, he served as co-producer, cinematographer, editor, and co-wrote its music.
This year’s Animated Feature category was a mix of disciplines and production scales. On the expensive studio side, there was Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot – both charming CG-animated films that were successful with critics and audiences. At the opposite end of the scale there was Australian writer-director Adam Elliot’s hard-edged and raw stop motion animated Memoir Of A Snail, made for around $4m.
Aardman’s stop motion animated comedy thriller Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, in terms of the scale of its production, sits somewhere between these two poles. With a budget of something like $20m according to Forbes, its creators had more resources than Flow or Memoir Of A Snail’s, but it’s nevertheless lean compared to Inside Out 2’s reported $200m or The Wild Robot’s $78m.
While there’s already been much debate over who should have won the animated feature category, Zilbalodis’ path to Oscar victory remains a fascinating one. Unable to find a university that taught animation in Latvia, he left school and began work on his first animated feature, Away, when he was 20. An atmospheric road trip story about a young man pursued across an island by a gigantic spectre, it immediately established Zilbalodis’ eye for a striking, painterly image – like Flow, it unfolds without resorting to a single line of dialogue.
Remarkably, Zilbalodis made Away almost entirely on his own, modelling and animating the entire 75-minute feature in the 3D program, Maya; he also composed all of its music himself, some of it on a mobile phone app. All told, Zilbalodis spent four years making Away.
“I was working pretty much seven days a week, maybe eight to 10 hours a day,” told Cartoon Brew in 2019. “Usually I started when I woke up and once I got tired I would stop. I didn’t try to finish what I had begun that morning. Because the process is so long, you have to brace yourself and prepare for the long production.”
Away won an award at that year’s Annecy International Film Festival, and work began on Flow a few months later. While Zilbalodis assembled a team of collaborators for his second feature, the production was nevertheless tiny. Numbers ranged from 15 to 20 artists and animators, though Zilbalodis later noted that these were seldom all working together at the same time; for the most part, he’d be animating scenes with three or four other collaborators at most.
Flow was animated using Blender, a free-to-use, open source software, with Zilbalodis spending around a year learning to use the platform and creating a proof-of-concept teaser trailer. Of the finished film, the animator wrote on Blender’s website, “The final render was done on my PC. There was no compositing, all the colours were tweaked and adjusted using shaders.”
In an Oscar line-up dominated by indie films, Flow is arguably the most inspiring of the lot. In little more than a decade, Zilbalodis has gone from a relatively unknown, self-taught animator working far outside Hollywood to an Academy Award winner. His film was made using freely-available software that just about anyone could learn to use themselves.
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Flow therefore offers a sliver of hope for any would-be animator who’s dreamed of a career in filmmaking. Not everyone can get a job at Pixar, but as Zilbalodis has proved, you can still build a career if you have enough skill, artistry and dedication.
