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!
For each update? I’d be the one with funding issues if I’d do that :D
Going into debt running Tumbleweed.
Sweats in Arch
If you pay per package, you get shaken down whenever GCC is updated.
That’s why they do it. A lot of people can’t afford to donate to software, so for those who can, it’s nice to make a sizeable contribution.
Each time I update
So in general that’s each time there’s a new LTS version I want to update to. I don’t so the nightlies or daily branches for most of my software and the ones that I do I basically throw some cash like each quarter or so depending on how much I use their software.
Blender for example I think put about $100 towards it last year, that was only the second year I was able to support them and the first year (4 years ago) I only put $15 towards them. And Blender got the most I put towards a project last year.
This year I’ve already put $30 towards Godot though. It’s ahead of Blender right now in 2025.
I try to do what I can, sometimes I can’t contribute and sometimes I can. I like to help where and when I can.
Unfortunately I may have to hold off for a few months as I just got a suprise bill for $1800 so it may be October (hopefully) when I can throw some cash their way again.
I also contribute to some content creators I enjoy, though not as many as I’d like.
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
That’s more than I can afford to be donating right now
Hopefully Deep Funding becomes popular enough that it no longer becomes a problem
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.
It’s a simpler animation style so don’t expect Pixar level stuff
One of the things you learn in art school is that if you aim for something like realism (or Pixar, in this case), but you fail to get there, people will notice and critique you for it. If you aim for a style you can do well, on the other hand, nobody will care that you didn’t do Realism (or Pixar).
Up and coming artists in any genre would do well to remember that it’s okay not to be Pixar or Capcom or whatever. Sometimes working within your limitations can inspire truly creative works.
I refer to this as the Wind Waker effect.
Before Wind Waker was announced, Nintendo did a reel showing off the power of the GameCube that included a “realistic” (for the time) fight scene between Link and Ganondorf. So when they announced a new Zelda game, people were hyped for a gritty realistic Zelda, and when the first trailers appeared, people hated it.
For years after its release, Wind Waker’s art style was dragged on by people, but today, it’s remembered as one of the most iconic Zelda games from that time period and a major influence on the aesthetic of many Zelda games after it.
Today, its art style looks just as good as it did when the game first launched, while most other games from that time period - especially those that went for high fidelity and realistic graphics - look outdated.
A good art style is timeless and will always age better than trying to push the envelope on graphical fidelity or realism.
Don Hertzfeldt made some amazing short films with a really, really simple art style.
The message sometimes matters more than the quality of the art. There is still a level of high quality to it despite the seemingly simple art style.
Exactly. When I play indie games, I go for simpler art style because it feels so much more cohesive.
That really bugs me in newer Pokémon games, the Pokémon don’t seem to fit well into the world. I’d much rather have old school Pokémon than inconsistent art direction.
I love gen 1 sprite work.
I always think about Metal Gear Solid when considering true top-tier 3D art. Actually, first-party Sony games in general tend to have the best 3D art out there.
Pixar animation is computationally intensive, but artistically it has way more in common with the 3D videos for babies that show up in youtube feeds if you’re not logged in.
Sure. I wasn’t implying they were realistic, I was just drawing an analogy between Realism, the classical art style, and modern animation styles (like Pixar’s). Whatever style or genre you aim for, do it well.
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’m planning to watch this one, got told it’s quite good.
It’s so fun and endearing! Really heartwarming.
Same
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.
First time my 3 year old saw The Lego Movie he got very upset at the part where they were falling at the end of the Wild West scene
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
Couldn’t touch it 5 years ago. Now its daily life for me.
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.
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.
Don’t watch it because it won an Oscar, watch it because it is a beautiful, sweet movie about animals helping each other.
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.
Excellent!
