Surprises have sometimes occurred in the Oscar animation categories but nothing like what has happened tonight. Both the feature and short animation categories were huge upsets by little films that weren’t backed by money, celebrity, or power.
Gints Zilbalodis’ dialogue-less Flow won the Academy Award for animated feature. It has received bountiful honors throughout awards season, but the Latvia/France/Belgium co-production still seemed like a longshot against big-budget contenders like Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out 2, and Aardman Animation’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
Some key notes on the award:
* Gints Zilbalodis, who is 30 years old, is the youngest director to win the Oscar for best animated feature.
* Flow is the first fully-European produced and funded film to win the feture animation Oscar.
* Flow is the first dialogue-less film to win the feature animation Oscar.
* Flow, made for under $4 million, is by far the lowest-budget film to ever win the category.
Equally surprising, if not moreso, was the Academy Award winner for animated short: the Iranian short In the Shadow of the Cypress directed by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani.
Cypress’s win upends much of the conventional wisdom about how one wins an Academy Award. Typically, once an animated short is nominated, filmmakers turn into politicians and spend time campaigning in person to influence Academy voters. The Iranian filmmakers didn’t do any of that, and not by choice.
Molayemi and Sohani were unable to arrange travel from Iran to the U.S. due to the political relations between the countries. As a result, they missed the entire Oscar season.
It was nothing short of a miracle that they were finally granted a visa at the very last moment. Molayemi and Sohani arrived in Los Angeles this morning, after a 25-hour flight, and Sohani said in an Instagram story that they are probably the only nominees in Oscar history to “go directly from the airport to the Oscars without any stop or rest.”
The win marks the first Oscar win in the category for a film from Iran, and the first win for an animated short from the Middle East. It is only the second time an Iranian film has been nominated, following last year’s Our Uniform.
More updates to come…
