It was a strong year for Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations, and an underdog triumphed. At the 97th annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles last night, Flow beat competition from Pixar’s Inside Out 2, DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot and Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
Gints Zilbalodis tale about a cat in a flooded world missed out on the Oscar for Best International Feature Film but still became Latvia’s first Oscar win. And it was surely also the first Oscar winner to be made entirely in the free 3D modelling software Blender, cementing the open-source program’s place among the best animation software.
Flow was one of our highlights of Annecy 2024, and it still seems incredible that it was made by a small team using Blender alone. It was rendered in EEVEE, Blender’s realtime render engine.
Gints thanked Blender when accepting the award. Speaking to press afterwards, he said: "Any kid now has tools that are used to make now Academy Award-winning films, so I think we’re going to see all kinds of exciting films being made from kids who might not have had a chance to do this before.
Reminder that Blender is struggling with funding right now. https://topicroomsvfx.com/news/the-price-of-free-blenders-funding-crisis/
Make sure to leave it a few bucks if you use it. https://fund.blender.org/
Whenever I download a new version of Blender I typically throw them $10 - $15.
Just like with other open source software I use, I give it a shot and if I like it I’ll throw them $10 - $15 each time I update.
Edit: It’s not much but it’s not nothing. No raindrop feels reasonable for the flood and all that.
thank you for your support to FOSS!
You do a lot, and thank you!
I also hope the studios behind the film made sure to pay a solid donation.
More than 99% of users including me
I didn’t hear they’re struggling? Its not like they can get more money and instantly increase the scope and just toss stuff on, people compare them to for profit companies who need to make a profit for investors, the amount of money they have would obv be less
Like they wont shut down anytime soon, but more miney will definitely lead to more features. Personally want to see simulation improvements, its just so poor compared to embergen/houdini.
The movie was really well done. It’s a simpler animation style so don’t expect Pixar level stuff, but the story and art direction are great.
I just saw the trailer and thought it looked good.
Pixar has conditioned us to only value a certain kind of 3D animation that is very round and lanky, similar to Popeye. It’s animation that exists to make things as easy as possible for the animators. Same thing with the calarts bean face. They don’t care about creativity or art. They only care about making money as reliably and easily as possible.
Pixar-style animation needs to die already. It’s like Corporate Memphis at this point.
I thought it was a game when I first saw the trailer and was mildly disappointed to find out it’s a movie 😅, still looking forward to watching it some time though.
Awesome to see Blender getting the love it deserves!
Recognition but not love. They will have no money.
Nuh uh, headline. I bet the soundtrack wasn’t made in Blender
There was somebody crazy enough to make an entire game in Blender, I don’t doubt that somebody has at least tried to make a soundtrack in Blender.
I made a game in Blender! Like the other reply said, it used to have a game engine built-in.
Blender used to have a games engine built into it. It was actually kinda fun but shit, they axed it once Unity became king.
You think I’m going to believe you? A deceptacon? Haha. Nice try.
You can draw sound waves with grease pencil so it should be possible
I wouldn’t be surprised. I like this one where the guy reproduces an entire functional/usable physical camera within Blender.
Magnetized needle and a steady hand.
I wonder what they used for that. Perhaps Ardour.
Yeah. The headline is an editorialisation by OP, not the original headline.
And it’s European! 🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺
Well-deserved win! Watched this in the cinema a few weeks back. What immediately struck me about the beautiful art style is that it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game than from a dreamworks/pixar studio – and it was incredibly refreshing! Also, for a movie where water plays a big role, the fluid rendering was absolutely breathtaking. I could almost smell the warm plastic air of a GPU giving its all.
it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game
I thought that too. It was like a long cutscene and I loved it.
I loved this movie!! It has zero dialogue!!
That cat was just amazing! Great flic.
Agreed!!
I liked the movie, but my (small) kids cried a lot during and after the movie.
Hahaha yeah same, was not expecting it to get on top of them so easily.
I feel like young kids these days are desensitized to scary imagery (ghosts and ghouls and blood and guts) but take jeopardy or peril really hard.
Incredible to see how far blender has come. I remember using it over ten years when I was trying to get off pirated software (3ds max), while it’s still recognisable the capability has exploded
i really wanna watch this in the cinema
It is available to stream on Max, which means that if you do not have the means to legally stream it there, you’ll be able to find it on the high seas. That said, if you do opt to watch it through “alternative means”, make sure to at least send a little money Blender’s way.
But they said they wanted to watch it in the cinema. Confused by this reply.
I’m excited to check this out. My tastes rarely align with those of the Academy, but this looks like it could be a really beautiful film and these kind of efforts deserve support.
It’s a very simple film without much depth to be honest. Memoir of a snail was far better.
without much depth
How much “depth” do you expect to get out a group of animals acting “mostly” natural and without a single line of human dialog? With those limitations, I think it excelled. There were even a couple tearjerker moments, for me at least.
Not having dialogue has nothing to do with. While the animals can only be so complex (if acting “naturally”), the storytelling is not limited to just that. They could’ve probably told more about the world with the elements and places the animals found. The animation was pretty crappy at some points too. The dog for example was not very well done.
Regardless of all of this, I’m not saying it should have been different, I only wanted to express that this movie is not worthy of an oscar when compared to something like Memoir Of A Snail, imo.
Family liked it, especially the kids, but the ending was like, wait what? It’s over?
I realized part way through the title works on a few levels. It was refreshing to realize this wasn’t remotely following the 3-act narrative structure and I had no idea what was happening next.
The poor whale x.x. I throught for sure the cat was going to climb the mountain and see the elk herd circling like in their dream.
But the thumbnail, isn’t that just the album cover from Nirvana’s Nevermind?
If you remove the fishes, replece the cat with a baby, and add a dollar on a fishing hook, it’s literally the same.
If my grandma had wheels she’d be a bike
Balls, said the Queen, if I had two I’d be a king!
With a huge drippin hog
Psshht, mine’s bigger.
Excellent!
Me and my mother watched it a few weeks ago knowing nothing about it and it was really good!
