The Wild Robot Is Great, But The Actual Best Animated Movie Won At The 2025 Oscars

Take that, Oscar prognosticators! The actual best animated movie of 2024 just took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 2025 Oscars. As visually interesting and emotionally devastating as "The Wild Robot" is, it just doesn't feel as groundbreaking a movie as the real best animated movie of the year, "Flow."

In case you haven't had the pleasure of watching Latvia's first Oscar-winning movie, Gints Zilbalodis's "Flow" follows a small black cat forced to survive a devastating apocalyptic flood by taking refuge in a boat alongside a dog, a lemur, a bird, and a capybara. It serves as both a phenomenal disaster movie and also a great post-apocalyptic movie, only starring a cat.

The film is completely devoid of dialogue and none of the characters are anthropomorphized, yet each of them exudes personality and feels like a fleshed-out, three-dimensional character. The film features exquisite animation, especially when it comes to the water, while Zilbalodis presents a vast world full of mystery and intrigue that keeps you guessing as to what is happening outside of the story of the main characters. It's a truly special work of animation, particularly because "Flow" is an indie production, without the support of either a big studio like DreamWorks or Disney, a big infrastructure for animation like there is in countries like France, or even a distributor with experience with animated movies and award seasons like GKIDS.

"Flow" winning Best Animated Feature is not only deserved, but a sign of times changing when it comes to awards season, and we are all the better for it.

"Flow" winning Best Animated Feature feels like proof that we're living in a new era for the category and for the medium of animation. For a long time, it felt as if the Oscars only had a Best Animated Feature category as an excuse to hand out awards to Disney and to make stupid jokes about the medium being for kids. But these days, the race for Best Animated Feature is one of the most unpredictable and exciting races in the entire Oscar season.

I've written before about how great it is for the medium of animation that Disney is no longer a powerhouse at the Oscars and rarely gets nominated anymore, but it goes beyond that. In the past three years, we've seen a stop-motion animated film from Guillermo del Toro win the Oscar, as well as a hand-drawn Hayao Miyazaki movie. Now, seeing "Flow" win the award, an indie animated movie with no recognizable names and no multi-million-dollar budget for either production or marketing, truly feels like confirmation that anything can happen at the Oscars when it comes to animation.