Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s enchanting eco-fable about a lone moggy in a flooded world is a triumph of imagination over budget

Animation as a medium and fairytales as a subject have always been natural bedfellows. You only need to look at Disney’s princess industrial complex to understand that sparkle-dusted happily-ever-after is big business; that the appetite for this particular breed of magical thinking (plus associated merchandising and sequined tat) is enduringly healthy. But the beguiling, Oscar-winning , dialogue-free Latvian animation Flow , which tells of a solitary cat who must learn to cooperate with a mismatched pack of other species to survive a catastrophic flood, is a little different.

The fairytale here is not the story the picture tells – it’s the story of the film itself. Created by a tiny team with a minuscule budget of about £3m, and rendered entirely on the free open-source 3D software Blender , Flow has been on a journey: its premiere in Cannes; the haul of prizes (54 to date), culminating in the Oscar for best animated feature – that is the stuff of film industry fantasy.

When the newly elected Bundestag meets for the first time this week, far-right Weidel, who lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan-born wife, will lead its largest opposition party

Alles für Deutschland , (“everything for Germany”) was once a Hitler-era rallying cry. It was more recently adopted by Björn Höcke, a high-ranking member of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland at party rallies, for which he was prosecuted.

Then in August last year the slogan popped up at events attended by Alice Weidel , the party’s co-leader, but in a subtly modified form – Alice für Deutschland. The party printed blue cardboard hearts bearing the slogan and distributed them to members, who held them up at rallies to show their approval.

The Conservative leader isn’t convincing fellow Tories that she possesses a viable route map to recovery

Kemi Badenoch is not much good at Prime Minister’s Questions. To which you might retort: so what? Everyone knows the weekly bout of mouth-to-mouth combat between prime minister and leader of the opposition is a theatrical ritual. The typical voter deplores it as a load of yah-boo, signifying nothing. Only a small minority of the public tune in on a consistent basis.

Mrs Badenoch’s problem is that PMQs is taken seriously by two audiences that should be important to the Tory leader. One is made up of Westminster reporters and commentators. Their verdict about who has “won” PMQs influences the overall judgment about whether a leader has forward momentum or is going nowhere. The other critical audience is made up of MPs. They crowd into the chamber for a ringside seat at the prize fight. A robust performance by a leader energises them, while a flop disheartens. More often than not, the Tory leader sends her side away feeling deflated. They were led to expect better from someone who was marketed on the basis that she had a zesty and combative personality. “She was hired because it was thought she would kick ass,” remarks a Conservative veteran. During the Tory leadership contest last autumn, one of the claims made for her by supporters was that she’d rattle Sir Keir Starmer. He leaves his encounters with the Tory leader looking distinctly unrattled.

In her new book, music writer Kate Mossman looks back at her favourite type of encounter – interviews with charismatic, ageing, male rockers. Here she remembers the band – and specifically drummer – who electrified her as a girl growing up in Norfolk

I am of a generation that had no name: we slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials. We are the last generation that will wow our grandchildren by explaining that we came of age completely without the internet. We wrote letters through secondary school; we replaced these with email when we got to university and wrote 15,000-word screeds to one another, which we still keep in files in our Hotmail accounts. Some of us ended up internet dating, but I have far more friends who settled down with their first or second love. We are neurotic, and depressive, but we didn’t know it until recently.

The thing we do share with those who came after is that when it comes to music, we and our parents have no generation gap. The great songwriters of the 1960s soundtracked our childhoods in their best-ofs and their unfashionable 80s incarnations. In my house, the “frog song” was given as much time as Sgt Pepper . Pop stars rose up like venerated family elders. Music was a communal activity; we were the cassette generation, and many families couldn’t afford to fly. We took long car ferry trips to France for our holidays, listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue in the Volvo.

A terrific second novel from the British author of Assembly examines what it means to be truthful – and who really benefits when facts come to light

Miriam Leonard, AKA Lenny, one of a tight core of characters at the heart of Natasha Brown’s terrific second novel, would probably dislike Universality intensely. Then again, she might love it, because an unpredictability of opinion is her stock in trade: a newspaper columnist who has recently sashayed from the comment pages of the Telegraph to those of the Observer , her views on class, race, sex, the economy and, latterly, the iniquity of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes are uncompromisingly held and vociferously broadcast, but only opaquely coherent. To keep moving is the trick.

Lenny is making a better fist of survival than many of those around her, with her exceptionally neat formula for wooing readers, which involves alighting on a news story and making “a lofty comparison”: “Obscure elements of European history are best, but a Russian novel or philosophical theory can be just as effective.” Certainly, she is faring better than disgraced banker Richard, cast out of his shiny-paned City office and his home in the Surrey stockbroker belt after a long read in which he has enthusiastically and, it turns out, foolhardily participated goes viral; the piece’s author, struggling freelance journalist Hannah, is briefly propelled to something approaching professional and personal respectability but finds herself similarly becalmed once the click-frenzy moves on. And neither of them would want to swap places with Jake, Lenny’s desperate and ne’er-do-well son (“a mass of wild hair, shambolic clothing and lifelong unaccountability”, she thinks grimly as she once again pushes him away), or with Pegasus, the aspiring communard whose utopian dream has irretrievably fractured.

By forming a new governing body, World Boxing, the Dutchman prevented the sport being banished by the IOC

“It feels like such a sweet week and of course I’m very happy and proud,” Boris van der Vorst says as, in his role as the founder and president of World Boxing, he takes a rare break to reflect on a mighty achievement. Just over two years ago, boxing had been struck off the initial programme for the Los Angeles Games in 2028 and it was about to be banished entirely from the Olympic movement. It was then that Van der Vorst set about establishing a new regulatory body to replace the discredited International Boxing Association.

His work, despite intense pressure, was vindicated when Thomas Bach, the outgoing International Olympic Committee president, announced on Monday that his executive board had recommended boxing’s inclusion in the LA Olympics. The key stipulation was in place, because the IOC recognised World Boxing as the sport’s new regulatory body, and on Thursday Bach’s recommendation was accepted. Boxing was welcomed back into the Olympic fold.

With ticket sales slow and concerns over burnout, football’s governing body is battling to win hearts and minds

This week president Donald Trump convened a prayer meeting in the Oval Office. Gathered around the Resolute desk, constructed from the timbers of a British naval vessel, a series of pastors laid their hands on the president’s thinning hair and prayed for his success. The only other item on the desk? The enormous intricate bauble that will serve as the trophy for Fifa’s Club World Cup.

That Trump should like the look of an object lacquered in 24-carat gold plating, and designed by the New York jewellers Tiffany & Co, is not perhaps a huge surprise. But its prominent position on the world’s most consequential desktop will surely also have been welcomed by the president of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, who left the trophy with Trump this month on his visit to the White House, a week after Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Apparently we’re in ‘the Age of Anti-Ambition’ – but the ick we feel towards those who are openly wanting is misplaced

A series of photos that circulated around awards season made the internet roundly do its nut. I will describe them, and you will see how our reactions show that earnestness has gone violently out of style. The first picture accompanied a quote from Jeremy Strong responding to his Oscar nomination. He’d put out a long statement saying this was the “realisation of a lifelong dream” and shared a photo of himself as a kid in 1993, when he spent the night “on cold metal bleachers” outside the Academy Awards to watch the nominees arrive. “I have not lost that feeling of excitement… I have devoted my life to the attempt to do genuine work that would be worthy of this honour.”

The second was an Instagram post where Strong’s Succession co-star Kieran Culkin reacted to his competing nomination with champagne on a balcony in Paris, and the phrase, “Let’s fucking gooooooo.”