Made with Blender, a free and open-source program, Flow wins big at Oscar

The 2024 Latvian adventure film Flow has bagged an Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards. Flow, despite its modest tech infrastructure and despite relying on just Blender for its animations, beat high-profile animation movies such as Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot. This is no doubt because Flow is a wonderful film, but it also puts spotlight on Blender because usually when it comes to winning or even getting nominated at prestigious awards like the Oscars, we often see films largely dominated by studios like Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks. The team included professionals like Martin Upitis, who developed a specialised add-on for water effects, and Konstantins Visnevskis who worked on rendering stylized fur of the animals used in the film.