It’s easy to take animated features for granted; they may look impressive up on the big screen, but the process isn’t only painfully time-consuming but incredibly expensive. For example, the recent Pixar release Inside Out 2 cost $200 million to make, which is a sizeable amount, especially when you consider the average live-action Hollywood feature costs between $100-150 million.

And although there’s little that can be done about the time the process takes – at least for now – there are other options as to how to produce it, as this Latvian animated feature proves.

A little grey cat is out exploring in the woods. It soon comes across a pack of dogs that are keen to chase it, as the cat runs for its life. But then they all come across something quite strange, when a herd of deer come tearing through the trees in blind panic.

It doesn’t take the cat long to work out why, as they are soon followed by gigantic waves washing up behind them. This puts the dog chase on pause, as they all make a run for it, hoping to avoid being washed away.

This is the start of an incredible adventure for not only the cat, but for them all, as the water continues to rise, swallowing up the land beneath their feet.

Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis didn’t have access to the kind of tech that the big Hollywood studios have, but it didn’t stop him from making his film. Instead he chose to make it with Blender, a free, open source piece of software, so that his film ended up costing only €3.5 million, which would probably get you the top half of a Buzz Lightyear for 30 seconds in a Hollywood flick.

It’s paid off for him too, as the film not only picked up a Golden Globe, but also an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the first independent feature ever to do so.

It’s an impressive achievement for such a small film, and it looks fantastic considering it was produced with software anyone can use. It does have its limitations however.

There’s no getting away from the fact that it looks very much like a cut scene from a video game that just doesn’t end. Although the environ is very green and lush, the character models are the type you would find in a game, with the main kitty protagonist not looking that dissimilar from the puss in last year’s release Little Kitty, Big City. And they have their restrictions, such as when the animals get out of the water, there’s absolutely no sign of them being wet, which is no doubt a limitation of the software used.

The story isn’t particularly original either, being a hybrid of Disney’s classic live-action 1963 film The Incredible Journey which like this one, didn’t feature any dialogue, as two dogs and a cat made their way home, crossed with a revised version of Noah’s Ark. It’s very sweet and charming, and is certainly an exercise in telling a narrative without dialogue, but the one hour 25 minute runtime does drag, meaning that it’s unlikely to hold the attention of youngsters for that long, or fidgety adults for that matter.

You get that it’s a tale about working together in adversity, even at the cost of bending believability to the point of snapping – especially with scenes where the animals have learnt how to steer a small sailing boat – but it’s also dreamy, ethereal and oddly spiritual.

There’s no denying that considering how it was created it’s a massive achievement, but by being a little too long, there just isn’t enough to the story to make it thoroughly engaging so doesn’t quite make the big splash intended.