New York Film Critics Circle Name ‘Flow’ Best Animated Feature Of 2024
The New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) made a statement tonight with their pick for the year’s best animated feature film: Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow, a dialogue-free $3.7 million Belgium/France/Latvia co-production that bested big-studio American movies with budgets that are orders of magnitude greater, including Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot.
The NYFCC, the oldest film critics group in the United States, is a solid indicator of future Academy Award nominees, though not necessarily winners. During years in which both the NYFCC and the Academy have handed out animated feature prizes, 20 of the 22 NYFCC winners have gone to be nominated for an Oscar. The NYFCC and Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have agreed half of the time on the winner in the last decade, including last year when Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron topped both events.
Flow, which is currently in limited release in Los Angeles and New York City through Janus Films, is expanding more widely this weekend. In addition to contending in the animated feature category of the Oscars, it has been submitted by Latvia as the country’s official entry for the international feature film category.
It premiered in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, and was a big hit at Annecy in June, picking up more awards than any other title in competition this year: the feature film jury award, audience award, Gan Foundation Award for Distribution, and best original music for a feature film. It is currently nominated in the animated feature category of the European Film Awards, which are being held on Saturday in Switzerland.
The animation was produced by Sacrebleu Productions (France) and Take Five (Belgium), while Zilbalodis produced through his own Latvian studio, Dream Well Studio.
