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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Awesome to see Blender getting the love it deserves!
Recognition but not love. They will have no money.
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’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.
Excellent!
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.
Nice! Have it on my watchlist hopefully I can see it soon :3
Any good places where one could stream this?
HBO Max. Or else you can rent it from digital sites
Family liked it, especially the kids, but the ending was like, wait what? It’s over?
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.
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.
It’s so much better than The Wild Robot!
I’m planning to watch this one, got told it’s quite good.
It’s so fun and endearing! Really heartwarming.
Same
And it’s European! 🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺
But the thumbnail, isn’t that just the album cover from Nirvana’s Nevermind?
With a huge drippin hog
Psshht, mine’s bigger.
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
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.
