A low-budget Latvian animated project beat the big guns of animation to the Best Animated Feature Oscar, joining Chinese movie Ne Zha 2 and Japanese anime in globalizing the successful genre.
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Summary
A low-budget Latvian animated project has won over the world with a dialogue-free film about animals working together to escape from a disastrous flood. It beat the big guns of animation, joining Chinese movie Ne Zha 2 and Japanese anime in globalizing the successful genre.
Academy Award win gives Latvia its first Oscar
Of all the comment-worthy aspects of this year’s Oscars ceremony, the most fascinating is the Best Animated Feature victory for low-budget Latvian animated feature Flow, an extraordinary feat for second-time director Gints Zilbalodis. The film was also nominated in the Best Foreign Film category, only the second animated film to be so, though that award went to Brazil’s I’m Still Here. Flow is the only Latvian film to be nominated for and therefore to win an Oscar.
Figure 1: Oscars 2025, Best Animated Feature nominees, box office to budget multiple
Source: Omdia
The Latvian/French/Belgian coproduction took five years to make, with a core crew of only 20 people and using open source software tool Blender. This explains how it was possible to make such a film for $3.6m, low by most standards though way higher than the director’s first film Away (<$100,000). This compares with $200m for Inside Out 2, which Flow beat to the Oscar. Then again, Inside Out 2 grossed $1.7bn in cinemas globally, making it the ninth-highest-grossing title of all time. This is why, even with the difference in budget, the US film is the most commercially successful, as of now, with a box office to budget multiple of 8.5× compared with 5.6× for the Latvian title. Among fellow nominees, The Wild Robot has a multiple of 4.2×, and that of Memoir of a Snail is only 0.3×. The UK film Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl was funded under a deal with Netflix and did not receive a meaningful theatrical release.
Awards aplenty and more visibility will drive its streaming life
After seeing how the Golden Globes boosted US streaming views and box office of both Emilia Perez and The Brutalist, it is worth watching closely to see if there is a similar boost for Flow. Having its premiere at Cannes 2024 and a domestic release last August, the film has been on release in the US since November, peaking at 375 screens in December. It is still playing now and has earned $4.2m to date, while according to sales agent Charades the film has taken $20m plus worldwide. The highest-grossing market is Mexico, where it has taken over $5m. Because Flow is a dialogue-free film, the costs of versioning (dubbing or subtitling) will be minimal, which helps it to travel across borders. Having said that, Flow has also become the highest-grossing Latvian film in its home market, racking up more than 300,000 cinema admissions. It has been available to buy or stream for over a month and moved to Warner’s Max service in mid-February 2025.
On an artistic note, the director says one of the most difficult aspects of the project was to create the flow of water, an echo of the recent comments by the director of Ne Zha 2 about using fluid dynamics and supercomputing to achieve that difficult effect. With Chinese animation, Japanese anime, and now European low-budget animation making headlines, the animation sector is hotting up globally.
Appendix
Further reading
“The coming of age of Chinese animation could drive China’s soft power ambitions as well as global box office in 2025” (February 2025)
Author
David Hancock, Chief Analyst, Media & Entertainment
