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.
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.
Pixar-style animation needs to die already. It’s like Corporate Memphis at this point.
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
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.
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.
Wanna watch it with my 6 and 9 year olds soon. Is it that sad?! I skipped through it and it looked nice.
Its not that its sad so much as there is a lot of stress and peril and the ending isn’t really happy or sad. Its a complicated movie that falls outside the disney format of “bad thing happens, good guys badn together, day is saved and everyone is fine”.
It feels like its exploring themes of loss and moving forward. But theres some moments where I genuinely have no idea what happened.
I kinda like exposing my kids to that though. The movie didnt spoon feed you answers and encourages you to draw your own conclusions. My 10 year old was hooked by the halfway mark but my 5 year old was like this the entire time 🫣
It’s not sad, but there’s a lot of anxiety inducing moments.
I’m planning to watch this one, got told it’s quite good.
Same
Rendered in EEVEE? Really? Wow! Considering you get so much more optical fidelity with Cycles it’s really astonishing they’ve used EEVEE.
The creator favoured speedy feedback on everything. And it’s not like you can’t make things look gorgeous in EEVEE, why go for fidelity when you can make things look nice.
FYI EEVEE now supports ray tracing so lighting can be much better than before with much less hassle. cycles is obviously better for pbr but EEVEE can easily be used for more stylized renders, and probably be preferred.
The fact that all the textures look painted explain why eevee was used. There are frames in this movie that look like literal oil paintings.
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
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.
Family liked it, especially the kids, but the ending was like, wait what? It’s over?
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.
Excellent!
Me and my mother watched it a few weeks ago knowing nothing about it and it was really good!
