GOLDEN GLOBE SHOCKER! ‘Flow’ Wins Best Animated Feature
The shocker of all shockers in the history of the Golden Globes animated feature award happened tonight. Flow, a dialogue-free (!), $3.7 million (!!) production from Latvia, Belgium, and France (!!!), won the honor.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. The film has already won prestigious awards like the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. But those awards are not always a harbinger of the bigger awards, like the Golden Globes, which have traditionally been dominated by big-budget studio titles with equally big promotional budgets.
Flow was up against two films from Disney, including the highest-grossing animated film of all time, as well as productions from Dreamworks and Netflix. (For the record, the other nominees in the category were Inside Out 2, Memoir of a Snail, Moana 2, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and The Wild Robot.)
For Flow, a nomination was supposed to be the honor, but to see the film emerging atop the field was something that few, if any, industry observers anticipated as a possibility until tonight. And that’s not a knock on the film – Flow is a fantastic film and one that I absolutely loved. But smaller films often get overlooked in the cutthroat universe of Hollywood awards.
The director, Gints Zilbalodis, is a 30-year-old Latvian filmmaker whose previous feature Away (2019) was entirely self-produced. For his new film, he had a modest budget and team, but nothing that could be compared to a Hollywood production. The win, it should be noted, also marks the first time that a film made with the open-source Blender software has won a Golden Globe.
Flow’s surprise triumph throws the rest of animation awards season in disarray. The frontrunners until the Golden Globes had been a contest between The Wild Robot, Inside Out 2, and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. After tonight though, Flow can no longer be overlooked as a leading contender for the Oscar.
The next big test for the film will be on January 12 when the Critics Choice Awards reveal their winners. The slate of nominees is the same as the Golden Globes, minus Moana 2.
Watch Zilbalodis’ acceptance speech below:
#Flow wins Best Motion Picture – Animated at the 2025 #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/754Pu7FfXl
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) January 6, 2025
