*WEB CONTINUATION: This article originally appeared in Volume 105 Issue 3 of our news magazine, Amplifier.

As it turns out, cats can triumph over both emotions and robots. At least, according to the Oscars, they can. On March 2, “Flow,” a movie produced by a small Latvian studio, bested movies such as DreamWorks’ “The Wild Robot” and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” for the Best Animated Film of 2025.

“Flow” is a movie told entirely through its action, following a cat and its mismatched group of animal friends as they attempt to survive during and in the wake of an extreme flood. Spearheaded by an indie Latvian studio, Dream Well Studio, with a budget of $4 million, the film features no words, only animal sounds. 

Morgan Moore, Spanish teacher, teaches the Spanish Short Stories and Film class. She has seen “Flow” and watched other international films in class and on her own time.

“[‘Flow’] wasn’t a Hollywood film, it didn’t have that progression. It had moments of excitement, moments of plot, but I just thought it was more of a snapshot,” Moore said. “I think that [having no dialogue] worked really well, and it would have taken away and cheapened it to have the animals actually talk to each other.”

The film is celebrated for its art, for which Moore gave a 10/10, though it wasn’t made in an expensive 3D modeling software. The movie, with its creatures and forest, ruin, and ocean scapes, was made in Blender, a free and open-source software that allowed the developers to use computer-generated animation.

“I’ve watched a lot of kids’ movies and some of the animation now, you can tell it’s very computer generated, and this had some aspects of that,” Moore said. “They did such an amazing job with the body language and emoting for these creatures, and then also just the background was gorgeous.”

Much of the film centered around the animals in the boat as they initially came together, got into conflicts with one another, and ultimately helped each other despite their many differences.

“I just thought that it was neat symbolism, kind of what we do in extreme circumstances, and how it forces different kinds of people, species, animals, to come together and find each other and find that they can rely on each other. I thought that was a really neat message,” Moore said.

The budget of “Flow” looks meager in comparison to that of “Inside Out 2,” a sequel to the movie “Inside Out,” both of which were produced by Pixar for Disney. The movie had a budget of $200 million, 50 times the budget of “Flow.”

But a lengthy budget doesn’t always make a film a winner, as “Flow” had 54 award wins out of 124 nominations, while “Inside Out 2” had only five wins out of 110 nominations, according to the IMDb award lists. They were nominated for 48 of the same awards, and “Flow” placed higher than “Inside Out 2” 20 total times, with 14 of those being wins.

“I think it’s great [that] this film got recognition for [the people] and recognition for the creativity that it had. And probably, I’m sure, [judges] recognized the budget they were working with and how they created such an amazing thing with a smaller budget,” Moore said.

The budget for “Inside Out”, according to Wikipedia, is equal to the largest budget for a non-Hollywood film, “The Battle at Lake Changjin,” and is less than half of the largest Hollywood budget of all time, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” at $553.2 million, as was stated by Forbes.

Lucas Sobotta, junior, can see the difference in resources between international and Hollywood studios when watching films in his Spanish Short Stories and Film class.

“There’s definitely less money [in] a lot of the films that we tend to watch in our class. I don’t think it necessarily makes the films any worse, you can just tell with the special effects and the costumes and sometimes even the acting that they didn’t have as much money to put into it,” Sobotta said. “The discrepancy is honestly mostly there because people all around the world will watch Hollywood movies, but movies from these countries tend to be isolated to Latin America.”

Without having sat down to watch the entirety of “Flow,” Sobotta could tell that the movie broke this often-seen pattern of less money equaling lower production quality.

“I really like the animation style, it looks really clean. A lot of [the] time, like with movies of foreign origin, the budget problem can make it not look as nice or polished, but I think the animation looks awesome,” Sobotta said.

But for all of the movie’s success, one has to wonder if this victory is really influential in context. Can a victory over Disney bring hope to other studios trying to break into the US market? Or is it too small of an accomplishment to end Hollywood’s near-total dominance in the space? 

“It is very important for these movies to win these awards because it will let us get more perspective than just the Hollywood one,” Sobotta said. “But, I also think that if it were to make a real impact on the indie scene, it would need to be a bigger award because the animated movie award tends to be the least prestigious one of the awards show. So, if any film were to win best film, then I think that would do a lot more.”

Moore, on the other hand, believes in the potential domino effect of “Flow” and how the studios and producers have more resources to create more award-winning movies in the future, which would make “Flow” an amplifier for the future success of international films.

“It does open doors because it shows other people that they can create and be recognized and be picked up, and with the success of this, more of those 20 studios at the beginning of the movie will be inclined to pick up on more unique projects,” Moore said. “So, I think that kind of exposure, when it’s giving credit to something that we aren’t normally going to see, is really good for all creators in every single type of art.”