This Oscar Season’s Great Underdog Story Is the Story of a Cat

There are cat people and dog people, but there are cat filmmakers and dog filmmakers.

The Wild Robot and Flow are both vying for the animated Oscar .

Both films take dramatically different approaches to their parallel fables, as distinct as two separate species.

Chantal Akerman , Agnès Varda , Chris Marker : cat filmmakers. Sean Baker is a dog filmmaker..

Flow is far more sophisticated than that work of juvenilia , but it retains a certain low-budget (more precisely, under $4 million ) charm.

To viewers who’ve grown accustomed to the animation industry’s push toward photorealism, Flow may look unfinished, even cheap, but there’s beauty in its simplicity, as well as an invitation.

Its style, its narrative obliqueness, and its less anthropomorphized characters require empathy and imagination.