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.
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.
Excellent!
I’ve seen it two times already and I’m going to see it a third time this WE !
run to see it !
Do you good! you need it !
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/
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.
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.
You do a lot, and thank you!
I also hope the studios behind the film made sure to pay a solid donation.
That’s more than I can afford to be donating right now
thank you for your support to FOSS!
For each update? I’d be the one with funding issues if I’d do that :D
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.
Going into debt running Tumbleweed.
If you pay per package, you get shaken down whenever GCC is updated.
Sweats in Arch
More than 99% of users including me
Nice! Have it on my watchlist hopefully I can see it soon :3
Me and my mother watched it a few weeks ago knowing nothing about it and it was really good!
Any good places where one could stream this?
HBO Max. Or else you can rent it from digital sites
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.
Don’t watch it because it won an Oscar, watch it because it is a beautiful, sweet movie about animals helping each other.
Rendered in EEVEE? Really? Wow! Considering you get so much more optical fidelity with Cycles it’s really astonishing they’ve used EEVEE.
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.
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.
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
Wanna watch it with my 6 and 9 year olds soon. Is it that sad?! I skipped through it and it looked nice.
It’s not sad, but there’s a lot of anxiety inducing moments.
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 🫣
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
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised. I like this one where the guy reproduces an entire functional/usable physical camera within Blender.
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 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.
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.
