Flow' Director Gints Zilbalodis Hopes Latvia's Animated Feature Oscar Win Inspires "Independent Animation Filmmakers Around The World"

Flow' wins the Best Animated Feature Oscar, the first indie winner of this category since its inception at the 2002 ceremony where 'Shrek' won.

Gints Zilbalodis’s Latvian film Flow —- which won the Oscar for best animated film some hours back at the 97th Academy Awards — manages to hold your attention through its 85-minute runtime without a single dialogue.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Flow,″ a wordless cat parable, won the Oscar for animated feature at Sunday’s 97th Academy Awards. The win gives Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis his first Academy Award.

Inside Out 2' and ‘The Wild Robot' from powerhouses Disney and DreamWorks were also nominated in the category.

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The wordless film follows animals forging an unlikely friendship as they fight to survive a natural disaster. But scary flood scenes and existential themes may be a bit much for the youngest viewers.

Flow,” the underdog entry from Latvia about a group of animals who band together to survive natural disaster, won out against big Hollywood nominees. The other contenders for best animated feature included Pixar’s global blockbuster “Inside Out 2” and DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot,

In a big win that underscored the growing prominence of indepedent animation, Gints Zibalodis’ “Flow,” the moving dialog-free tale of a solitary cat’s journey as it learns to survive after a great flood – that was made with open-source software Blender for just $3.