“Initially Predicted as an Oscar Winner, ‘The Wild Robot’ Faces Competition from ‘Flow’.”

This was supposed to be the year of The Wild Robot. DreamWorks Animation, which in the past decade had become known mainly for churning out animated sequels, must have known they had something special on their hands when their latest animated movie combined the studio’s more expressive, brushstroke-evocative animation style (also seen, with some variation, in The Bad Guys and their Puss in Boots sequel) with a story that feels fresh in the context of The Boss Baby: Back in Business (the movie is based on a children’s novel, as are most of the non-sequel DreamWorks cartoons these days). Riding some ecstatic reviews, the movie became the biggest-grossing non-sequel DreamWorks cartoon in nearly a decade, and the company set its sights on the coming awards season.

DreamWorks may have overreached at first, when they seemed hopeful that they might wedge The Wild Robot into the Best Picture race. But even as it became clear that was unlikely to happen, everything else seemed to be breaking The Wild Robot’s way. Disney and Pixar, the corporate siblings who have collectively won Best Animated Feature 15 of the 24 times it’s been awarded, both put out sequels this year, and Moana 2 in particular was not all that well-received compared to the 2016 original. There was no Studio Ghibli title in the mix, and this year’s two stop-motion offerings were another sequel (Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl) and a beautifully made but depressing Australian grotesquerie (Memoir of a Snail). Once the nominations were out, it looked like DreamWorks – who have received as many Best Animated Feature nominations as Disney has flat-out won – would have a clear path to winning its first animation Oscar since Shrek, which was the category’s inaugural victor nearly a quarter-century ago.

Now, as the awards approach, so does a spoiler: Flow, the wordless Latvian cartoon that’s been tearing up the charts on Max, off the back of its Best Animated Feature nomination – and another one, for Best International Feature.

The Wild Robot still might win the animation Oscar. It’s probably the smart bet; though this category has gotten more adventurous and international with its nominees over the years, a heartfelt kid-friendly American studio movie still prevails more often than not. But Flow has won a number of awards-season prizes, seems to be the critical and movie-fan favorite, and might be more in keeping with the last couple of years, where Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron triumphed over more mainstream fare, acknowledging how Disney and Pixar have both weakened in consistency. Flow might also have an unanticipated advantage: It’s pretty much doing what The Wild Robot is doing, but better.

The Wild Robot is a frequently lovely movie not unlike Wall-E or The Iron Giant – both better films, but still ambitious and worthy comparison points for a studio cartoon. It’s about a factory-issue robot (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) who winds up on a human-free island and becomes the caretaker for a baby goose, whose family she accidentally trampled while running from a bear. Learning the language of the animals allows her to understand them in the equivalent of human voices – which means that after about 20 minutes of robot-only voices in the movie, the animals start to talk. The robot bonds with the goose and attempts to teach him how to fly, but when the truth about his family comes to light, their relationship fractures.

In short, it’s a bittersweet and often funny movie about a robot learning to live in the wild, altering its own programming to care more meaningfully for a living thing (rather than living as a servant), which eventually becomes more of a standard-issue family cartoon: jabbering animals, some big elaborate action/chase scenes, and, most awkwardly, a strong helping of parental guilt, where the contrite robot dutifully steps back when the goose is angry with her. She still cares for her adopted child from afar, willing to sacrifice herself for his safety even when he’s not speaking to her, and it all feels distractingly close to a more personal, call-your-parents form of robo-martyrdom than the more genuinely altruistic gesture in The Iron Giant. In short, it’s a bit much.

Flow, on the other hand, is comfortable with the minimalism that The Wild Robot only flirts with. Set at an indeterminate time in an indeterminate place – possibly Earth, but if so, a flooded and unfamiliar version of it – Flow starts following a cat, just trying to survive as floodwaters rise around him. Or her; we can’t tell, because there isn’t a gendered voice, celebrity or otherwise, attached to the cat character. He acts more or less like a real cat, with a few minor adjustments in ingenuity and intelligence to keep the story moving. The cat winds up in a boat with a team of other animals: a bird, a dog, a lemur, and a capybara. (A savvy choice; when I saw the movie theatrically, a murmur of excitement passed through the children in the audience when the capybara first appeared.) They navigate this dangerous landscape, mostly together, communicating largely through the sounds that animals make. It’s sort of like one of those old animal-adventure movies like Benji the Hunted or Homeward Bound, rendered in dreamlike animation.

Some have described that animation style as cheap-looking, and indeed, Flow was made on a budget using open-source software, a clear labor of love for director Gints Zilbalodis. But the smudgier look of the animal’s fur (a break in computer-animation orthodoxy from every-shimmering-hair detail) also resembles the more painterly approach The Wild Robot takes to its digital line work, and calls more attention to the eyes and body language of these animals as means of expression, rather than getting hung up on technical issues. Like Wild Robot, Flow prizes that expressiveness over glinting realism. Unlike The Wild Robot, it doesn’t make concessions to preconceptions of what a family audience can handle. It’s less laser-targeted in its survival-movie themes, more open to interpretation even on a plot level, and more trusting that its audience will be swept along by the strangeness of its explorations, not requiring constant dialogue to tell rather than show.

Yet Flow is hardly something an older kid couldn’t handle; for what it’s worth, the nine-year-old I took to see it absolutely loved it. (There also many social-media reports that the nation’s cats have found it transfixing.) I do wonder if the fact that it’s not necessarily a more “adult” offering – just a most-ages movies with a greater sense of surprise – will help it even further in the Oscar race. Could this be karmic payback for the number of DreamWorks movies that felt suspiciously similar to other animated projects, like Antz jumping ahead of A Bug’s Life, or Shark Tale feeling like a Finding Nemo ripoff? Maybe, but Flow really is playing fair: This is a movie that’s doing a lot of The Wild Robot’s job, inadvertently laying bare how low the standards can be in American studios for this potentially boundless medium. If it blocks DreamWorks’ second Oscar, this little Latvian animal adventure might reflow the course of prestige animation.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Flow on Max