12 ms·

Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

847 points by boguscoder 2y ago

edflsafoiewq 2y ago
My kingdom for a hyphen!
- anamexis 2y ago
  You owe @dang your kingdom :)
  - boguscoder 2y ago
    I fixed it myself so perhaps I can claim half of the kingdom and half of the horse, please
kylecazar 2y ago
I heard him thank Blender in the first few sentences and had to Google it to see if he was talking about THAT Blender! I remember doing all the tutorials when I was younger and considering game dev.
- bombcar 2y ago
  "I would like to thank Blender, and Flexo, and Fry."
neoecos 2y ago
This is the first movie I took my 3 yo kids to watch in a theater. My wife and I are FOSS enthusiasts.
owenpalmer 2y ago
I remember being a little kid learning Blender, rooting for it to become the industry standard. It's amazing to see how much the project has grown.
LostMyLogin 2y ago
Loved the film and was so happy to see it win. First nomination for Latvia I believe.
- madars 2y ago
  First two nominations, in fact - Flow also got nominated for Best International Feature Film which went to Brazil's "I'm Still Here." Flow is a beautiful film and I can wholeheartedly recommend HN audience to watch it. It also has 97% audience rating and 98% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
tzs 2y ago
That's kind of surprising. Academy members are not required to watch all the nominees for Best Animated Feature before voting. In fact they are not require to watch any of them. Several years ago I remember that after a year where the movie that won best animated was not the one that those in the animation industry overwhelming thought was sure to win some animation industry magazine survived Academy members asking which movie they voted for and why. What they found was that a large number of the voters thought of animated movies as just for little kids and hadn't actually watched any of the nominees. They picked their vote by whatever they remembered children in their lives watching. E.g., if they were parents of young children, they'd vote for whatever movie that their kids kept watching over and over. If they no longer had children at home they would ask grandkids or nieces or nephews "what cartoon did you like last year?" and vote for that. Another factor was that a lot of these people would vote for the one they had heard the most about. That gives Disney a big advantage. How the heck did Flow overcome that? Inside Out 2 had a much wider theatrical release in the US, was widely advertised, made $650 million domestic, is the second highest grossing animated movie of all time so far worldwide, and streams on Disney+. All that should contribute to making it likely that those large numbers of "vote even though they don't watch animated movies" Academy members would have heard of it. Flow had a small US theatrical release at the end of the year. I didn't see any advertising for it. I'd expect a lot of Academy members hadn't heard of it. As a guess, maybe Moana 2 is the movie that the kids are repeat streaming. That was not a nominee so maybe those "vote for what my kid watched" voters didn't vote this year and so we actually got a year where quality non-Disney movies had a chance?
- lukasb 2y ago
  Flow was a critical favorite, sometimes that matters at the Oscars.
- dmazzoni 2y ago
  The Grammy awards for music are the same thing. Members aren't required to listen to the nominated albums, and every member gets to vote in every category. I had a friend who was a Recording Academy member as a classical musician. He thought it was strange that they asked him to vote for the best hip-hop album since he doesn't listen to hip-hop at all. So for many of the categories that are a little more niche, it basically turns into a popularity contest, rather than the opinion of true experts.
lemming 2y ago
I’m very pleased to see this, Flow was such a lovely film. I didn’t realise it was made with blender!
dang 2y ago
Recent and related: First time a Blender-made production has won the Golden Globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620656 - Jan 2025 (49 comments)
jsheard 2y ago
Not only was it made with Blender, the final renders were done with Blenders semi-realtime Eevee engine rather than its max-fidelity Cycles engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds. "Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but having an alternative which is viable on a shoestring budget is very valuable.
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  I am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm? Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.
  - hamaluik 2y ago
    Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great community example of this.
    - ad-astra 2y ago
      I made my own distributed render orchestrator that supports Cycles + custom plugins. It uses Modal’s cloud compute APIs to spawn jobs on up to 20x containers with an L40S GPU (like 80% as fast as a 4090 with tons more VRAM) each. It ain’t cheap but it’s absurdly fast, and much easier in terms of cash flow than outright buying the equivalent GPUs. https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render-modal https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render...
      - sbarre 2y ago
        That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time. I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?
maxglute 2y ago
It shows, Blender has come a long way, but FLOW doesn't look technically incredible. On the otherhand, I just rewatched Shrek recently, and complex graphics isn't everything.
- bolognafairy 2y ago
  Take a look at the earlier concepts / renderings for Shrek! Before the studio gutted the team(?) and told everyone to pull their heads in. Absolutely off-putting.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  No kidding, Shrek probably had to do with 100x less computing (per hour) than a modern production. First Toy Story probably something like 1000x less computing We did come a long way
  - pbronez 2y ago
    Great example of how accumulated technical innovations unlock unexpected opportunities. Flow, Shrek and Toy Story have roughly similar technical quality but vastly different price tags. That cost reduction allows more experimentation, which delivers more compelling outcomes.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      It's kind of surprising to go back and watch Toy Story in 4k today - the rendering really is quite rudimentary compared to what even video games put out now. But - you have to be paying attention to see it, because Pixar knew the limitation of their systems. For example, rendering of the time made everything look plasticy, so they rendered ... plastic toys as the main characters! The most noticeable graphical issues are with the rendering of people, but those are put in the background.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  What do people mean with technically impressive? There are Blender renders that look quite incredible though and you just cannot differentiate it from real picture anymore Example: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58586fa5ebbd1a60e7d76d3e/1493827389159-WMJLIL76ASA5KQPKZND8/image-asset.jpeg?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58586fa5ebbd1a... There are probably some flaws here as well, but you need to study the picture in detail. And Flow used the fast renderer of Blender, not the quality one. Still, it does have a unique style that is much more interesting than many other animated movies. So what is technically impressive, just throwing more compute at it to make it photorealistic? I think art style will have a larger impact. In a way it is technically impressive as it didn't need a lot of compute power.
viccis 2y ago
As someone who started using Blender before 1.8, posting on the old blender.nl forums before its move to BA, it's just been pretty insane to watch it reach this point. Back then it didn't even have ray tracing, and all of the attempts to make long form videos with it were very very rudimentary.
legitster 2y ago
I did not find Flow to be a technically impressive movie. The animation was very imperfect. The rendering (especially shadows and textures) were off. The whole movie looked like a video game cut scene. But oh boy, what an amazing cutscene to watch. I'm worried that the story the media is putting forward is that this was an innovative and cutting edge movie - based only on a superficial appreciation of the (stunning) art design. But the real story is how the director worked within his limitations to make something equally enjoyable and meaningful as the other guys. Most importantly, this movie passed the Actual Kid (TM) test. My 7 year old and his friends sat raptured through the entire movie without any slapstick, pop music numbers, or even dialogue! Not once, but 4 times now!
- crooked-v 2y ago
  I feel like it kind of fits in the same category as Hundreds of Beavers (also a fantastic film), as something using the roughness of low-cost methods as a genuine part of the artistic style.
- brundolf 2y ago
  A takeaway may be that cutting-edge rendering doesn't really matter for cartoon-stylized films, especially for kid viewers
  - stvltvs 2y ago
    Yep, grew up on cartoons like Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, etc. Looking at them now, they are laughably bad in most respects, but they sparked our imaginations and didn't need to be sophisticated to do it.
    - agumonkey 2y ago
      yes, there's a balance to get and visual "perfection" is nothing real, even star wars had blunders and visibly lesser tricks, but the whole created a deep sense of wonder and you got along
      - 2y ago
namuol 2y ago
Hey look, the good guys won! It was well-deserved. Three generations within my family all loved it start to finish, including the snobs like me - that’s no small feat. (Nothing against the other nominees though of course, just seeing the little guy take a huge W makes me feel good and … I feel a bit starved of this kind of W lately? Just me?)
febin 2y ago
Animation of Flow (Blender Conference 2024) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxz6p-QATfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxz6p-QATfs
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Was wondering this when the film started winning stuff earlier in Awards season... What is the connection between these things? Quirky meme video from awhile back: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMkyTWLpV/ https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMkyTWLpV/ I don't really understand the Blender model/meme-world crossover here - can someone explain? Similar models? Similar concept? Same creators? Kinda wacky. Complete coincidence?!
- dkh 2y ago
  Look, I don't know if you have seen the movie, and I get that both the film and this TikTok video contain 1) a black cat and 2) a lush green backdrop. But one is a feature film that marvelously captured the mannerisms of its animal characters, has made countless adults cry and just won an Oscar. The other is a vacuous, seconds-long video where 2 static animal models rock back/forth a couple times on their Z-axis and spin a couple times on their Y-axis. Do you really think the similarities are striking, enough so to raise questions? Do you actually think there's a chance they are made by the same creator? I think to most people, the film and this video look like polar opposites.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  I think it’s a bummer you’re getting downvoted because there is a connection, and it’s actually quite relevant to some other comments. The connection is not in the characters or plot, but in the expectations of the audience. People have now had many years of being entertained by poorly rendered silly stuff like this TikTok. There are thousands of variations on this theme that have racked up huge viewership numbers, despite looking super cheap with almost no narrative. In fact to some extent the crappy aesthetics are part of why people like these. So with this cultural background, when folks see something like Flow, they are not going to reject it immediately just on aesthetics. Arguably they recognize the aesthetics as a choice, and to them, the lack of explanation along the way is aligned with that choice.
FpUser 2y ago
I could not give a flying fuck what it was rendered with , tech level is not impressive. But what a story and presentation. I find Flow beautiful. I, my daughter and my grandson watched it and could not take our eyes away from it.
- dkh 2y ago
  You may not care, and you don't have to, but certainly it means a lot to the Blender Foundation, who for 23 years have been actively working on something free & open-source, and now finally it is in the big leagues. Just as Flow's win looks even more impressive when you look at the films it competed against, who produced them, and what resources they had, Blender has been a project competing for parity and to be taken seriously while remaining totally free, and going up against systems that are either wildly expensive or not available outside the studio that made it at all. Flow is not good because it was made with Blender, but Blender is proven to be very good and in that top echelon because Flow was made with it. For those who make or use Blender, this is big. Those folks have already believed for years/decades that Blender was great and serious, but now a lot more people outside that circle will know this, too.
  - FpUser 2y ago
    Look, I am in no way trying to diminish work developers put in Blender. It is great product. I saw videos made in Blender that looks way better than Flow from the tech point of view. My point was that the value of Flow is in its story, both written and visual and far overshadows any technical aspect. Avatar for example is totally opposite from that point of view in my opinion. Great graphics and absolutely meh, story.
    - elaus 2y ago
      And the value of Blender (or any 3D rendering software) is not only the fidelity of the rendered result, but the tools it gives artists to transform their vision into something that can be rendered by a computer.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
guelo 2y ago
I am baffled. My family found it boring, senseless and my kids didn't want to finish watching it. My theory is that the lack of talking makes people imagine there is something there when there is nothing. It makes zero sense. The graphics are also not very good.
- thatswrong0 2y ago
  What isn’t there to get? it’s a dead simple concept
  - guelo 2y ago
    How? I feel like I'm being trolled. None of it makes sense. There's an unexplained great flood, unexplained human ruins, weird whale-like creatures, some kind of being sucked up into heaven thing that happens to the stork-like bird. I've seen people online trying to put it into a sensible plot but it's so heavy on made up symbolism that to me it's bullshit.
    - jgilias 2y ago
      I assume people found it refreshing that for one there’s an animated picture that doesn’t just pour down your throat the same story rehashed for the 1000-th time, and spelled out by a committee to ensure it’s “easy to understand”.
    - eurekin 2y ago
      I haven't seen the movie, but based solely on your comment, it reminds me of how Miyazaki films are often described—full of fantastical, otherworldly wonders that evoke the joy of exploring the unknown.
      - lucasoshiro 2y ago
        It really has a Ghibli-like feeling. I found that it has the same dream-like feeling that Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron have. And that discomfort that the commenter felt is what I felt when watching Ghibli for the first time.
danbmil 2y ago
I would love to see the day when Autodesk is sold to some scumbag bigCo for peanuts.
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
Still trying to find some english subtitles for the film More seriously, I really enjoyed the film and it shows the importance of getting the story and emotional connection right.
- fnands 2y ago
  Lol
mppm 2y ago
I am honestly surprised by this. Congrats to the makers and to the Blender community, of course, but to me Flow looked more like a feature-film-length demo reel. And not even the most impressive demo reel, visually speaking. Compared to all the other animation films out there... I don't think it would rank even in the top 100 for me.
- sbarre 2y ago
  What would be your defining criteria for "best animated film" ?
  - mppm 2y ago
    The overall package -- plot, characters, visual style. There are so many movies that nail all three, but Flow is weak in every category, IMO.
lucideng 2y ago
For me, Flow's greatest strength was the complete lack of voiceovers, almost like a silent film. No overbearing narrator coercing you. Flow allows you to feel on your own terms without interference. With most media since the dawn of Hollywood, the internet and now AI, we are accustomed to being told exactly what is happening. Think about how 'laugh tracks' tell you to laugh. The search for an answer or meaning of something is largely taken away from you. Without that instruction you are left to make your own interpretation of things, no delivery of a specific message or theme. This means the movie is experienced differently by everyone. That why it's so great.
- fosterbuster 2y ago
  Almost reminiscentof Hitchcock only using intertitles sparingly, instead letting the images convey the story.
Deprogrammer9 2y ago
[dead]
qwertox 2y ago
Also thanks to Ton Roosendaal. Creating the Blender Foundation and starting the "Free Blender"-campaign with the hopes of getting Blender to where it is now is something I was doubting if it would ever work out. And it did. Blender is one of those gems in the OSS ecosystem.
microflash 2y ago
I adored this film. We have three generations at home with different depths of expertise in different languages and this transcended all those barriers making it so very enjoyable experience to watch together. Truly a family friendly film at so many levels.
harlanji 2y ago
Well earned. Best overall movie since Napoleon Dynamite. I happened into the Hacker Dojo (in Mountain View) the other night after traveling in from Central Valley for the weekend and about 8 of us watched the movie glued to our seats and discussed it for another couple hours. My first thought was "this looks like Blender" when I saw the cat, and we did talk about some that resolution and information density as one layer of the movie. I had no background on the movie, had never heard of it, just happened in by chance. Massive serendipity felt tho, on a side note. Kudos to the team who did the film.
dismalaf 2y ago
On one hand, its super cool that a Blender made film won an Oscar. On the other hand, I hate that this film is being held up as a "Blender film" since it really doesn't showcase what Blender can do. Blender is capable of far, far better visuals than what this film chose as their art style.

847 points by boguscoder 2y ago

edflsafoiewq 2y ago

My kingdom for a hyphen!

anamexis 2y ago
You owe @dang your kingdom :)
- boguscoder 2y ago
  I fixed it myself so perhaps I can claim half of the kingdom and half of the horse, please

kylecazar 2y ago

I heard him thank Blender in the first few sentences and had to Google it to see if he was talking about THAT Blender! I remember doing all the tutorials when I was younger and considering game dev.

bombcar 2y ago
"I would like to thank Blender, and Flexo, and Fry."

neoecos 2y ago

This is the first movie I took my 3 yo kids to watch in a theater. My wife and I are FOSS enthusiasts.

owenpalmer 2y ago

I remember being a little kid learning Blender, rooting for it to become the industry standard. It's amazing to see how much the project has grown.

LostMyLogin 2y ago

Loved the film and was so happy to see it win. First nomination for Latvia I believe.

madars 2y ago
First two nominations, in fact - Flow also got nominated for Best International Feature Film which went to Brazil's "I'm Still Here." Flow is a beautiful film and I can wholeheartedly recommend HN audience to watch it. It also has 97% audience rating and 98% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

tzs 2y ago

That's kind of surprising. Academy members are not required to watch all the nominees for Best Animated Feature before voting. In fact they are not require to watch any of them. Several years ago I remember that after a year where the movie that won best animated was not the one that those in the animation industry overwhelming thought was sure to win some animation industry magazine survived Academy members asking which movie they voted for and why. What they found was that a large number of the voters thought of animated movies as just for little kids and hadn't actually watched any of the nominees. They picked their vote by whatever they remembered children in their lives watching. E.g., if they were parents of young children, they'd vote for whatever movie that their kids kept watching over and over. If they no longer had children at home they would ask grandkids or nieces or nephews "what cartoon did you like last year?" and vote for that. Another factor was that a lot of these people would vote for the one they had heard the most about. That gives Disney a big advantage. How the heck did Flow overcome that? Inside Out 2 had a much wider theatrical release in the US, was widely advertised, made $650 million domestic, is the second highest grossing animated movie of all time so far worldwide, and streams on Disney+. All that should contribute to making it likely that those large numbers of "vote even though they don't watch animated movies" Academy members would have heard of it. Flow had a small US theatrical release at the end of the year. I didn't see any advertising for it. I'd expect a lot of Academy members hadn't heard of it. As a guess, maybe Moana 2 is the movie that the kids are repeat streaming. That was not a nominee so maybe those "vote for what my kid watched" voters didn't vote this year and so we actually got a year where quality non-Disney movies had a chance?

lukasb 2y ago
Flow was a critical favorite, sometimes that matters at the Oscars.
dmazzoni 2y ago
The Grammy awards for music are the same thing. Members aren't required to listen to the nominated albums, and every member gets to vote in every category. I had a friend who was a Recording Academy member as a classical musician. He thought it was strange that they asked him to vote for the best hip-hop album since he doesn't listen to hip-hop at all. So for many of the categories that are a little more niche, it basically turns into a popularity contest, rather than the opinion of true experts.

lemming 2y ago

I’m very pleased to see this, Flow was such a lovely film. I didn’t realise it was made with blender!

dang 2y ago

Recent and related: First time a Blender-made production has won the Golden Globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620656 - Jan 2025 (49 comments)

jsheard 2y ago

Not only was it made with Blender, the final renders were done with Blenders semi-realtime Eevee engine rather than its max-fidelity Cycles engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds. "Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but having an alternative which is viable on a shoestring budget is very valuable.

teruakohatu 2y ago
I am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm? Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.
- hamaluik 2y ago
  Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great community example of this.
  - ad-astra 2y ago
    I made my own distributed render orchestrator that supports Cycles + custom plugins. It uses Modal’s cloud compute APIs to spawn jobs on up to 20x containers with an L40S GPU (like 80% as fast as a 4090 with tons more VRAM) each. It ain’t cheap but it’s absurdly fast, and much easier in terms of cash flow than outright buying the equivalent GPUs. https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render-modal https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render...
    - sbarre 2y ago
      That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time. I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?

maxglute 2y ago

It shows, Blender has come a long way, but FLOW doesn't look technically incredible. On the otherhand, I just rewatched Shrek recently, and complex graphics isn't everything.

bolognafairy 2y ago
Take a look at the earlier concepts / renderings for Shrek! Before the studio gutted the team(?) and told everyone to pull their heads in. Absolutely off-putting.
raverbashing 2y ago
No kidding, Shrek probably had to do with 100x less computing (per hour) than a modern production. First Toy Story probably something like 1000x less computing We did come a long way
- pbronez 2y ago
  Great example of how accumulated technical innovations unlock unexpected opportunities. Flow, Shrek and Toy Story have roughly similar technical quality but vastly different price tags. That cost reduction allows more experimentation, which delivers more compelling outcomes.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    It's kind of surprising to go back and watch Toy Story in 4k today - the rendering really is quite rudimentary compared to what even video games put out now. But - you have to be paying attention to see it, because Pixar knew the limitation of their systems. For example, rendering of the time made everything look plasticy, so they rendered ... plastic toys as the main characters! The most noticeable graphical issues are with the rendering of people, but those are put in the background.
raxxorraxor 2y ago
What do people mean with technically impressive? There are Blender renders that look quite incredible though and you just cannot differentiate it from real picture anymore Example: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58586fa5ebbd1a60e7d76d3e/1493827389159-WMJLIL76ASA5KQPKZND8/image-asset.jpeg?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58586fa5ebbd1a... There are probably some flaws here as well, but you need to study the picture in detail. And Flow used the fast renderer of Blender, not the quality one. Still, it does have a unique style that is much more interesting than many other animated movies. So what is technically impressive, just throwing more compute at it to make it photorealistic? I think art style will have a larger impact. In a way it is technically impressive as it didn't need a lot of compute power.

viccis 2y ago

As someone who started using Blender before 1.8, posting on the old blender.nl forums before its move to BA, it's just been pretty insane to watch it reach this point. Back then it didn't even have ray tracing, and all of the attempts to make long form videos with it were very very rudimentary.

legitster 2y ago

I did not find Flow to be a technically impressive movie. The animation was very imperfect. The rendering (especially shadows and textures) were off. The whole movie looked like a video game cut scene. But oh boy, what an amazing cutscene to watch. I'm worried that the story the media is putting forward is that this was an innovative and cutting edge movie - based only on a superficial appreciation of the (stunning) art design. But the real story is how the director worked within his limitations to make something equally enjoyable and meaningful as the other guys. Most importantly, this movie passed the Actual Kid (TM) test. My 7 year old and his friends sat raptured through the entire movie without any slapstick, pop music numbers, or even dialogue! Not once, but 4 times now!

crooked-v 2y ago
I feel like it kind of fits in the same category as Hundreds of Beavers (also a fantastic film), as something using the roughness of low-cost methods as a genuine part of the artistic style.
brundolf 2y ago
A takeaway may be that cutting-edge rendering doesn't really matter for cartoon-stylized films, especially for kid viewers
- stvltvs 2y ago
  Yep, grew up on cartoons like Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, etc. Looking at them now, they are laughably bad in most respects, but they sparked our imaginations and didn't need to be sophisticated to do it.
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    yes, there's a balance to get and visual "perfection" is nothing real, even star wars had blunders and visibly lesser tricks, but the whole created a deep sense of wonder and you got along
    - 2y ago

namuol 2y ago

Hey look, the good guys won! It was well-deserved. Three generations within my family all loved it start to finish, including the snobs like me - that’s no small feat. (Nothing against the other nominees though of course, just seeing the little guy take a huge W makes me feel good and … I feel a bit starved of this kind of W lately? Just me?)

febin 2y ago

Animation of Flow (Blender Conference 2024) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxz6p-QATfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxz6p-QATfs

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Was wondering this when the film started winning stuff earlier in Awards season... What is the connection between these things? Quirky meme video from awhile back: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMkyTWLpV/ https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMkyTWLpV/ I don't really understand the Blender model/meme-world crossover here - can someone explain? Similar models? Similar concept? Same creators? Kinda wacky. Complete coincidence?!

dkh 2y ago
Look, I don't know if you have seen the movie, and I get that both the film and this TikTok video contain 1) a black cat and 2) a lush green backdrop. But one is a feature film that marvelously captured the mannerisms of its animal characters, has made countless adults cry and just won an Oscar. The other is a vacuous, seconds-long video where 2 static animal models rock back/forth a couple times on their Z-axis and spin a couple times on their Y-axis. Do you really think the similarities are striking, enough so to raise questions? Do you actually think there's a chance they are made by the same creator? I think to most people, the film and this video look like polar opposites.
snowwrestler 2y ago
I think it’s a bummer you’re getting downvoted because there is a connection, and it’s actually quite relevant to some other comments. The connection is not in the characters or plot, but in the expectations of the audience. People have now had many years of being entertained by poorly rendered silly stuff like this TikTok. There are thousands of variations on this theme that have racked up huge viewership numbers, despite looking super cheap with almost no narrative. In fact to some extent the crappy aesthetics are part of why people like these. So with this cultural background, when folks see something like Flow, they are not going to reject it immediately just on aesthetics. Arguably they recognize the aesthetics as a choice, and to them, the lack of explanation along the way is aligned with that choice.

FpUser 2y ago

I could not give a flying fuck what it was rendered with , tech level is not impressive. But what a story and presentation. I find Flow beautiful. I, my daughter and my grandson watched it and could not take our eyes away from it.

dkh 2y ago
You may not care, and you don't have to, but certainly it means a lot to the Blender Foundation, who for 23 years have been actively working on something free & open-source, and now finally it is in the big leagues. Just as Flow's win looks even more impressive when you look at the films it competed against, who produced them, and what resources they had, Blender has been a project competing for parity and to be taken seriously while remaining totally free, and going up against systems that are either wildly expensive or not available outside the studio that made it at all. Flow is not good because it was made with Blender, but Blender is proven to be very good and in that top echelon because Flow was made with it. For those who make or use Blender, this is big. Those folks have already believed for years/decades that Blender was great and serious, but now a lot more people outside that circle will know this, too.
- FpUser 2y ago
  Look, I am in no way trying to diminish work developers put in Blender. It is great product. I saw videos made in Blender that looks way better than Flow from the tech point of view. My point was that the value of Flow is in its story, both written and visual and far overshadows any technical aspect. Avatar for example is totally opposite from that point of view in my opinion. Great graphics and absolutely meh, story.
  - elaus 2y ago
    And the value of Blender (or any 3D rendering software) is not only the fidelity of the rendered result, but the tools it gives artists to transform their vision into something that can be rendered by a computer.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

guelo 2y ago

I am baffled. My family found it boring, senseless and my kids didn't want to finish watching it. My theory is that the lack of talking makes people imagine there is something there when there is nothing. It makes zero sense. The graphics are also not very good.

thatswrong0 2y ago
What isn’t there to get? it’s a dead simple concept
- guelo 2y ago
  How? I feel like I'm being trolled. None of it makes sense. There's an unexplained great flood, unexplained human ruins, weird whale-like creatures, some kind of being sucked up into heaven thing that happens to the stork-like bird. I've seen people online trying to put it into a sensible plot but it's so heavy on made up symbolism that to me it's bullshit.
  - jgilias 2y ago
    I assume people found it refreshing that for one there’s an animated picture that doesn’t just pour down your throat the same story rehashed for the 1000-th time, and spelled out by a committee to ensure it’s “easy to understand”.
  - eurekin 2y ago
    I haven't seen the movie, but based solely on your comment, it reminds me of how Miyazaki films are often described—full of fantastical, otherworldly wonders that evoke the joy of exploring the unknown.
    - lucasoshiro 2y ago
      It really has a Ghibli-like feeling. I found that it has the same dream-like feeling that Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron have. And that discomfort that the commenter felt is what I felt when watching Ghibli for the first time.

danbmil 2y ago

I would love to see the day when Autodesk is sold to some scumbag bigCo for peanuts.

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

Still trying to find some english subtitles for the film More seriously, I really enjoyed the film and it shows the importance of getting the story and emotional connection right.

fnands 2y ago
Lol

mppm 2y ago

I am honestly surprised by this. Congrats to the makers and to the Blender community, of course, but to me Flow looked more like a feature-film-length demo reel. And not even the most impressive demo reel, visually speaking. Compared to all the other animation films out there... I don't think it would rank even in the top 100 for me.

sbarre 2y ago
What would be your defining criteria for "best animated film" ?
- mppm 2y ago
  The overall package -- plot, characters, visual style. There are so many movies that nail all three, but Flow is weak in every category, IMO.

lucideng 2y ago

For me, Flow's greatest strength was the complete lack of voiceovers, almost like a silent film. No overbearing narrator coercing you. Flow allows you to feel on your own terms without interference. With most media since the dawn of Hollywood, the internet and now AI, we are accustomed to being told exactly what is happening. Think about how 'laugh tracks' tell you to laugh. The search for an answer or meaning of something is largely taken away from you. Without that instruction you are left to make your own interpretation of things, no delivery of a specific message or theme. This means the movie is experienced differently by everyone. That why it's so great.

fosterbuster 2y ago
Almost reminiscentof Hitchcock only using intertitles sparingly, instead letting the images convey the story.

Deprogrammer9 2y ago

[dead]

qwertox 2y ago

Also thanks to Ton Roosendaal. Creating the Blender Foundation and starting the "Free Blender"-campaign with the hopes of getting Blender to where it is now is something I was doubting if it would ever work out. And it did. Blender is one of those gems in the OSS ecosystem.

microflash 2y ago

I adored this film. We have three generations at home with different depths of expertise in different languages and this transcended all those barriers making it so very enjoyable experience to watch together. Truly a family friendly film at so many levels.

harlanji 2y ago

Well earned. Best overall movie since Napoleon Dynamite. I happened into the Hacker Dojo (in Mountain View) the other night after traveling in from Central Valley for the weekend and about 8 of us watched the movie glued to our seats and discussed it for another couple hours. My first thought was "this looks like Blender" when I saw the cat, and we did talk about some that resolution and information density as one layer of the movie. I had no background on the movie, had never heard of it, just happened in by chance. Massive serendipity felt tho, on a side note. Kudos to the team who did the film.

dismalaf 2y ago

On one hand, its super cool that a Blender made film won an Oscar. On the other hand, I hate that this film is being held up as a "Blender film" since it really doesn't showcase what Blender can do. Blender is capable of far, far better visuals than what this film chose as their art style.