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.
Now I'm curious how the film would look if it was rendered in Cycles, there are some lighting aspects that really feel "off". Perhaps now that the film is acclaimed they could release a remaster done in Cycles.
First off, switching to Cycles is probably quite a bit of work. While the renderers are supposed to be interchangeable, since AFAIK Cycles supports more features than Evee, options that previously did not matter with Evee rendering now have to be set for Cycles.
Also, having seen the film, I found the "unrealistic", cartoonish look very much to be a creative choice. Evee can produce much more "realistic" renders than what you see in the movie, but this requires also much more investment into things like assets and textures, otherwise you quickly land in the uncanny valley. So I think switching to Cycles probably would not matter much, unless the creators would also change their creative choices, which would result in a different movie, but not necessarily a better one.
What's odd in Flow is the contrast between the near-realistic non-animal rendering, and the non-realistic animal rendering. It didn't bother me much - it was clearly an aesthetic choice - but I know people who were bothered by the contrast.
I kind of hope they don't. I like the humble, democratic, FOSS spirit - it's like Dogme 95 / "Vows of Chastity".
"rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, while excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology. It was supposedly created as an attempt to "take back power for the directors as artists" as opposed to the movie studio."
I had a negative initial reaction to the animation style but it hooked me in and blew me away. It had virtues far more vital than render quality. In contrast, I bailed on "Inside Out 2" and have no interest retrying. I hope more people are encouraged to create lofi meaningful movies instead of thinking it's the preserve of billion dollar studios and sweat-shop animation factories.
Like the first time I played Super Mario Bros. on an LED screen. Finally I could see each pixel clearly, exactly the way the original artist didn't intend!
Edit: in all seriousness, this makes me wonder: has anyone ever re-orchestrated Beethoven's Fifth? Say, in the orchestration style of Ravel or Strauss? Someone must have done this, even as a joke, and I'd love to hear it. (I know about the "Fifth of Beethoven" disco tune which is great, but that's not what I'm asking about.)
Haven't watched yet but that was my gut reaction. When the engine first got stable released I tried it and was impressed at how quickly it got to a 90% solution, but the now complicated lighting scenarios that it couldn't handle took me back to cycles.
Cycle's renders are beautiful, but 10 minutes per frame can be a hard sell... I wonder, if anybody tried rendering in cycles to output eevee's primitves. I remember that was one of the tricks that architecture rendering community used - just paint with lights in places that a full blown global rendering/path tracing would do.
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.
I think I've seen some amazing Blender hacker put Cycles to the test on a machine with both NVIDIA and Intel GPUs. Love it that their API seems that portable and able to parrallelize on heterogeneous hardware. Amazing software work.
Getting blender to run on my NVIDIA GPU and AMD CPU simultaneously is as easy as checking two boxes in the settings. It's not usually worth it since the GPU absolutely smokes the CPU. it's a testament to how well blender is made that it works at all, let alone that trivially.
IIRC, the Blender Foundation's Open Source movies have been rendered on render farms from the very first one, produced over 20 years ago. This predates Cycles/Eevee, but I don't think it's something they'd regress on.
a stupid-simple approach would be to split up the render betweeen machines by manually starting it on each one and setting different frame ranges to render
Once you feel like that isn't enough anymore, you can also start dividing each frame into a grid of N cells and distribute that :) As long as the rendering is deterministic, you'd just join the cells into a complete frame on the coordinator.
You're probably referring to Cycles X [1], which if I'm not mistaken has already been released.
It will never be on-par with Eevee's performance though as they are fundamentally different approaches to rendering: Cycles is a physically-based path-tracing engine, while Eevee uses rasterization through OpenGL.
I just had a look at the trailer, and I'm trying not to poo on it's parade, but this thing looks... disappointing - worse than most in-game cut-scenes these days. It doesn't even feel "Artistic", and I'm definitely not a snob for "hyper realistic" types of looks.
The distant and "landscape" views look very nice, and in stark contrast to the game-like and amateur rendering of close up scenes with the animals. They don't even have anti-aliasing and the things look "blocky".
I hope this thing won because of the story and characters, and not its visuals.
There are incredible visuals in the movie, but not because of their realistic details. They are instead incredibly evocative of a mysterious depth behind the relatively small story being told in the movie.
The movie doesn’t look real, but it also doesn’t act real either.
I watched Flow in the theater. On the big screen, the less-polished look definitely comes across as an artistic choice, enhancing the otherworldly quality of the world and scenes it depicts. Combined with the great animation of the animals and the audio, you leave the theater in wonder. I suspect the visual roughness becomes more jarring in a less immersive environment.
With the amount of utter trash that modern Hollywood puts out, combined with the Oscars always feeling like a "pat on the back for rich snobs," I am just genuinely happy to see something like this win anything at all.
I agree, but mainly for some other reasons I won't be listing just now. As much as I find it all very cute and I'm a sucker for this kind of shit (I can already sense I would cry my heart out watching this at some point or another--I know, I'm very sensitive), it kinda looks like a long-winded tech demo or video placeholder.
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!
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.
But some of the really old (like 1940s) cartoons were very smooth and well-done. I have DVDs of old Tom & Jerry cartoons, and they are excellent.
My experience, is that the ones made in the 1970s and 1980s had crap quality.
I watched this movie, and think it very much deserved the Oscar, but the character rendering was a bit “scruffy.” The environment rendering was great, and it looks like they optimized for movement, in the characters, which was a good choice. Once I spent some time, watching, the rough rendering didn’t matter.
I had a similar experience, watching Avatar. At first, it seemed like a cartoon, but I quickly became immersed, and the fact it was rendered, didn’t matter.
I read, somewhere, that the movie is being re-rendered. I think they may have the money for that, now.
Animation quality has always been a question of budget and motivation: the shortcuts (still or partially still images, reuse of cels and whole sequences, lower frame rate and systematically repeated frames, less effort at designing intermediate poses and timing them well, badly drawn interpolations between key frames...) are always the same and always available, with modest impact from technological advances (e.g. badly drawn interpolation done by a neural network or by an IK simulation instead of an inexpensive, overworked and unskilled artist).
Crap quality is typical of cheap TV productions, e.g. Hanna-Barbera and some anime in the seventies and eighties.
> My experience, is that the ones made in the 1970s and 1980s had crap quality.
Because a lot of it turned into a marketing machine thanks to GI Joe. Cheap cartoons enabled kid oriented commercial slots to sell ad time for junk food and toys. The 80's were notorious for throwing all sorts of action figure selling ideas at the wall. Every 80's kid had some cartoon merchandise toy crap.
If the goal is sparking the imagination, these flaws are often a feature, not a bug. You have to do a little bit of work to complete the picture. That's also why the original book is almost always better than the fully rendered movie inspired by the book. No matter the budget.
You have things like Homestar Runner that were animated in Flash.
Animation tools are just part of the story-telling tools, and just because something is visually beautiful in stills (or even animated) doesn't mean that the story is well told, or the tools well used.
And often 'bad graphics' or whatever you want to call it can actually help with the story, just like low-def TV, because it covers up things that are unimportant without drawing attention to it.
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
The Star Wars trilogy wasn't great cinema, but the amount of time we spent playing with improvised light sabers and trying to move objects with the Force attests to the imaginative possibilities behind it.
it was visually ground breaking though, and there was something strange because if you look at movies of that era, a lot of attempts at space action fantasy existed, but they all looked crudely crafted and not believable. there was an alignment of talent, from VFX to audio, to music that made the whole thing hold
nintendo has distilled their own flavor of "disney magic". their flagship games are polished beyond belief, the art direction is a careful choice. they hit the borderlands bullseye over and over - not particularly cutting edge to a gfx professional but unique, cohesive, and beloved.
A key there (and it sounds like in the OP) is that art direction is an order of magnitude more important than graphics technology, especially these days
A lot of the cartoons I watched as a kid had excellent animation, and a lot was very primitive 3D rendering that looks horrible in comparison. As a kid, I didn't even notice!
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.
Recently I reminisced about Blender foundations first(?) effort, Tears of Steel, with the script like "Look, Celia, we have to follow our passions; you have your robotics and I just want to be awesome in space!" - "Why don’t you just admit that you’re freaked out by my robot hand?!"
I don't know what they've been up to after Tears of Steel but the primary mission of the older Blender Foundation movies was to further the tech, e.g. motion tracking.
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?
Interesting. I loved Flow and I'm glad the stars aligned for it on this particular occasion. This article [1] lists a bunch of other Oscar-related firsts:
* Gints Zilbalodis, who is 30 years old, is the youngest director to win the Oscar for best animated feature.
* Flow is the first fully-European produced and funded film to win the feture animation Oscar.
* Flow is the first dialogue-less film to win the feature animation Oscar.
* Flow, made for under $4 million, is by far the lowest-budget film to ever win the category.
It also says the winner of the animated short category, In the Shadow of the Cypress, was unexpected since the Iranian filmmakers couldn't do any of the usual in-person campaigning of Academy voters due to visa problems.
1. The academy has had a significant increase of young voters in the past 10 years or so. Generally speaking, young voters are more likely to take animation as a "serious" medium.
2. These interviews were always somewhat overstated. Of course some voters have stupid rationales, but I don't think this dominates the academy.
3. Disney's Inside Out 2 was nowhere close to winning the award this year - Flow's biggest competition was The Wild Robot, which did gross far more than Inside Out 2, but far below Inside Out 2.
If you look at the past couple years, The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli) won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Elemental nowhere close) in 2023, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Turning Red nowhere close) in 2022, etc.
I'm curious what year you're thinking about above. Perhaps Toy Story 4 over Klaus in 2019?
4. The results can still be valid if there’s a lot of random noise in the sample. There are about 10,000 voters here. If 9,000 vote at random and 1,000 watch the films and vote on merit, there’s about a 2% chance of getting a different result than if all 10,000 watched and voted on merit.
I would guess this is, to some degree, a generational shift. The Animated category has only existed for ~30 years and was born from the resentment many in the academy felt toward Beauty and the Beast being nominated alongside supposedly serious films for Best Picture. Each generation following that one has grown up with a more diverse slate of animated films available.
The Oscars are the slowest possible reflection of social change, and I’m sure the perspective you share is still held my many members, but this win holds out some hope for sure.
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.
I adored Flow. It's hard to say it was truly "better" than Inside Out 2. I think part of the calculation has to be that everyone expected Pixar to deliver something top notch so it only really met expectations. Flow was made by a no-name team from Latvia and was really something unique and interesting. I went into it kinda blind with no expectations and was blown away.
I didn't think inside out 2 was a very good movie.
It had good ideas but didn't do very well with them (contrary to the first movie, which was great). I'm not surprised a movie which wasn't "just a sequel" managed to beat Moana and IO2.
This is my point though. Inside Out 2 suffered from high expectations. If Pixar never existed and Inside Out 2 came from an unknown studio it would have blown you away.
Exactly. Pixar is somewhat a victim of its own success, but in this case Inside Out 2 is just Inside Out again - none of the additions or developments are really surprising.
And that's not bad! Sometimes you really do just want more of the same - after all, many wildly successful TV shows are just the same story, told differently each episode.
Flow wildly beat expectations which already gives it a leg up, but it was "new and weird" enough that I bet more of the reviewers actually watched it vs Inside Out 2 or other big-name movies.
Even the tagline of "feature length movie with no dialogue that's actually good" is enough to get people interested.
They aren't required to watch them, but the voters do all get screeners. They at least have the opportunity to watch it, regardless of whether they've seen it in the theater. They don't vote just for what they've heard of.
The Academy has a reputation for seeking "artistic merit" even at a cost of good entertainment. They're hoping to advance something that didn't do well at the box office. Sometimes that means giving awards to films that turn out to be dogs, but sometimes they manage to promote things that deserve attention.
A lot of Oscar-bait gets a small release at the end of the year, to qualify it for the Oscars. If it gets a nomination, they'll use that as part of a wider campaign later. That's why they send out screeners: they know that many members won't have had a chance to see it in the theater.
I suspect as I said elsewhere that "feature length movie with no dialogue that's actually good" was enough to get people watching it, even seeking it out. We're more than a hundred years out from silent movies, so it's a curiosity by that metric alone.
And then it turns out to be actually good!
It's similar to the Lego Movie in that respect, everyone had assumptions about what it was and then it went and was well done and hit you right in the feels.
> I suspect as I said elsewhere that "feature length movie with no dialogue that's actually good" was enough to get people watching it, even seeking it out. We're more than a hundred years out from silent movies, so it's a curiosity by that metric alone
There have been 4 other Best Animated nominees with no dialogue.
• "Shaun the Sheep Movie" (2015) with 99% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average critic rating of 8.1/10
• "The Red Turtle" (2016) with 93% on RT and an average critic rating 8.10/10
• "A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon" (2019) with 96% on RT with an average critic rating of 7.5/10
• "Robot Dreams" (2023) with 98% on RT and an average critic rating of 8.4/10
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I think people are specifically referring to the movie not looking technically impressive, not that Blender isn't capable of technically impressive renders at all.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, the real time stuff is pretty solid in blender but for very high image quality / realistic prerendering, blender is still missing a lot of the professional/proprietaries tools that gives the last 10% of polish in big budget productions (photorealism). The community has done a great job in last 10 years but there's still a lot of technical tools locked behind something like max/maya ecosystems professional paywall that most people eventually transitions to for "serious" industry work because pipelines are hard to change. At least that's the state a few years 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point is that this amazing story could be produced, as a finished movie, by a team that only needed to raise about $3M. Precisely how much of that is because they used Blender is still not clear to me, but the importance of Blender's use here is that it opens the door to equivalently great (or even better!) story telling on (relatively) low budgets ($3M is still a lot to raise, it seems to me). This story would never have been made if it needed $30M or $300M to make.
>" but the importance of Blender's use here is that it opens the door to equivalently great (or even better!) story telling on (relatively) low budgets"
I agree that what they have achieved for "only $3M" is nothing but amazing. I have no idea how much money was saved by using Blender.
> I could not give a flying fuck what it was rendered with , tech level is not impressive.
It's pretty impressive to me that something of Flow's quality could be created with free software that's avilable to anyone with an internet connection. There are a lot of highly creative people out in the world without massive amounts of money for expensive hardware/software. It's exciting for the future of animation, and I hope all the news stories talking about Flow being made with Blender will inspire more people to give it a try and see what they can do with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
That's the thing with narrative art. It doesn't click the same way, or at all, with everybody. And there is nothing wrong with that. Art that tries too hard to be appealing to everybody ends up being tepid.
To me, for example, with the bits I've heard about the plot, Flow's story doesn't sound particularly appealing. But I'm over the Moon with the news of how it was made, and the fact that budding movie producers won't have to declare bankruptcy after paying Maxon for software licenses. And because the financial barrier is now slightly lower, it means there will be slightly less scripts-by-committee, and slightly better art for non-mainstream audiences.
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.
> There's an unexplained great flood, unexplained human ruins
And that's the point. Perhaps you didn't like the movie because you are used to movies that every single detail needs to have a meaning and you were expecting that everything would be eventually explained. In this movie, things just happen and its story is not about them, but about how the characters react to them. Just like real life.
Specially for animals like the main characters. From a perspective of a pet, it's unexplained why its owners leave and return to their homes everyday at the same time; it's also unexplained why they can't pee everywhere. But they can manage to follow their lives and adapt to those unexplained facts without needing to understanding them.
And for me, this is what makes this movie great. It puts me in that perspective of an animal in a human world, where nothing really seems to make sense and it's pointless to try to find a meaning. And that's the opposite of <insert here any mainstream movie with animals as main characters> where we try to give a human perspective of what happens in their lives.
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.
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”.
That's the whole point. That it's not explained and you are left with tantalizing questions. It's ok to not like it. Not everyone likes the same things.
Your brain is just on one end of a spectrum that doesn't really respond to the same things as some other people's brains. There are plenty of people who are moved by things that have nothing to do with plot, and would never say something like "made up symbolism". Images, sounds, and symbols evoke mental connections and feelings in many people. A painting has no plot, an abstract painting is made up symbols. Many people find incredible depth and beauty in these things. Some people find that David Lynch's work is the most impressive tapping of human dream like subconscious ever achieved, and others absolutely do not understand it at all.
Why do you expect everyone to come away with the same message? Watching it, I thought about friendship, growth, climate change, death. Other people will see something else in it.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
Now I'm curious how the film would look if it was rendered in Cycles, there are some lighting aspects that really feel "off". Perhaps now that the film is acclaimed they could release a remaster done in Cycles.
First off, switching to Cycles is probably quite a bit of work. While the renderers are supposed to be interchangeable, since AFAIK Cycles supports more features than Evee, options that previously did not matter with Evee rendering now have to be set for Cycles.
Also, having seen the film, I found the "unrealistic", cartoonish look very much to be a creative choice. Evee can produce much more "realistic" renders than what you see in the movie, but this requires also much more investment into things like assets and textures, otherwise you quickly land in the uncanny valley. So I think switching to Cycles probably would not matter much, unless the creators would also change their creative choices, which would result in a different movie, but not necessarily a better one.
What's odd in Flow is the contrast between the near-realistic non-animal rendering, and the non-realistic animal rendering. It didn't bother me much - it was clearly an aesthetic choice - but I know people who were bothered by the contrast.
This is arguably true for all director’s cuts and remasters ever released.
I kind of hope they don't. I like the humble, democratic, FOSS spirit - it's like Dogme 95 / "Vows of Chastity".
"rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, while excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology. It was supposedly created as an attempt to "take back power for the directors as artists" as opposed to the movie studio."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95
I had a negative initial reaction to the animation style but it hooked me in and blew me away. It had virtues far more vital than render quality. In contrast, I bailed on "Inside Out 2" and have no interest retrying. I hope more people are encouraged to create lofi meaningful movies instead of thinking it's the preserve of billion dollar studios and sweat-shop animation factories.
It could be revelatory.
Like the first time I played Super Mario Bros. on an LED screen. Finally I could see each pixel clearly, exactly the way the original artist didn't intend!
Edit: in all seriousness, this makes me wonder: has anyone ever re-orchestrated Beethoven's Fifth? Say, in the orchestration style of Ravel or Strauss? Someone must have done this, even as a joke, and I'd love to hear it. (I know about the "Fifth of Beethoven" disco tune which is great, but that's not what I'm asking about.)
Somewhat in this vein is Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons. I liked it, but I am definitely not a purist.
Haven't watched yet but that was my gut reaction. When the engine first got stable released I tried it and was impressed at how quickly it got to a 90% solution, but the now complicated lighting scenarios that it couldn't handle took me back to cycles.
Cycle's renders are beautiful, but 10 minutes per frame can be a hard sell... I wonder, if anybody tried rendering in cycles to output eevee's primitves. I remember that was one of the tricks that architecture rendering community used - just paint with lights in places that a full blown global rendering/path tracing would do.
That is a common assumption, but there are ways to get your PC to do better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=a0GW8Na5CIE
Blender has a lot of other problems, but CUDA/Optix support is there for reasonable hardware =3
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.
Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great community example of this.
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...
That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time.
I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?
Thanks for checking it out! And yeah, I’m not expecting it to gain much traction, just having fun with it.
Second title should have been named the Book of Job IMO
Sure why not, updated.
An 1.5 hour movie at 24 FPS has ~130k frames to render. As long as you have less machines than that the parallelization is essentially free.
Any embarrassingly parallel task can scale almost infinitely by throwing more resources at it.
I think I've seen some amazing Blender hacker put Cycles to the test on a machine with both NVIDIA and Intel GPUs. Love it that their API seems that portable and able to parrallelize on heterogeneous hardware. Amazing software work.
Getting blender to run on my NVIDIA GPU and AMD CPU simultaneously is as easy as checking two boxes in the settings. It's not usually worth it since the GPU absolutely smokes the CPU. it's a testament to how well blender is made that it works at all, let alone that trivially.
IIRC, the Blender Foundation's Open Source movies have been rendered on render farms from the very first one, produced over 20 years ago. This predates Cycles/Eevee, but I don't think it's something they'd regress on.
a stupid-simple approach would be to split up the render betweeen machines by manually starting it on each one and setting different frame ranges to render
Once you feel like that isn't enough anymore, you can also start dividing each frame into a grid of N cells and distribute that :) As long as the rendering is deterministic, you'd just join the cells into a complete frame on the coordinator.
Weren't Blender working on a more efficient cycles renderer?
You're probably referring to Cycles X [1], which if I'm not mistaken has already been released.
It will never be on-par with Eevee's performance though as they are fundamentally different approaches to rendering: Cycles is a physically-based path-tracing engine, while Eevee uses rasterization through OpenGL.
1: https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/
You're right.
I think I confused it with the Eevee Next project released last year.
https://code.blender.org/2024/07/eevee-next-generation-in-bl...
I just had a look at the trailer, and I'm trying not to poo on it's parade, but this thing looks... disappointing - worse than most in-game cut-scenes these days. It doesn't even feel "Artistic", and I'm definitely not a snob for "hyper realistic" types of looks.
The distant and "landscape" views look very nice, and in stark contrast to the game-like and amateur rendering of close up scenes with the animals. They don't even have anti-aliasing and the things look "blocky".
I hope this thing won because of the story and characters, and not its visuals.
There are incredible visuals in the movie, but not because of their realistic details. They are instead incredibly evocative of a mysterious depth behind the relatively small story being told in the movie.
The movie doesn’t look real, but it also doesn’t act real either.
I watched Flow in the theater. On the big screen, the less-polished look definitely comes across as an artistic choice, enhancing the otherworldly quality of the world and scenes it depicts. Combined with the great animation of the animals and the audio, you leave the theater in wonder. I suspect the visual roughness becomes more jarring in a less immersive environment.
With the amount of utter trash that modern Hollywood puts out, combined with the Oscars always feeling like a "pat on the back for rich snobs," I am just genuinely happy to see something like this win anything at all.
Seems like a fluke, though.
The look is scruffy.
The story is not, and the visuals are sufficient to tell the story.
I agree, but mainly for some other reasons I won't be listing just now. As much as I find it all very cute and I'm a sucker for this kind of shit (I can already sense I would cry my heart out watching this at some point or another--I know, I'm very sensitive), it kinda looks like a long-winded tech demo or video placeholder.
Honestly yeah it won't be "perfect" but neither is a videogame being rendered in real time and it looks pretty good
Since they're not going crazy with effects it seems like a good compromise
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!
A takeaway may be that cutting-edge rendering doesn't really matter for cartoon-stylized films, especially for kid viewers
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.
But some of the really old (like 1940s) cartoons were very smooth and well-done. I have DVDs of old Tom & Jerry cartoons, and they are excellent.
My experience, is that the ones made in the 1970s and 1980s had crap quality.
I watched this movie, and think it very much deserved the Oscar, but the character rendering was a bit “scruffy.” The environment rendering was great, and it looks like they optimized for movement, in the characters, which was a good choice. Once I spent some time, watching, the rough rendering didn’t matter.
I had a similar experience, watching Avatar. At first, it seemed like a cartoon, but I quickly became immersed, and the fact it was rendered, didn’t matter.
I read, somewhere, that the movie is being re-rendered. I think they may have the money for that, now.
Animation quality has always been a question of budget and motivation: the shortcuts (still or partially still images, reuse of cels and whole sequences, lower frame rate and systematically repeated frames, less effort at designing intermediate poses and timing them well, badly drawn interpolations between key frames...) are always the same and always available, with modest impact from technological advances (e.g. badly drawn interpolation done by a neural network or by an IK simulation instead of an inexpensive, overworked and unskilled artist).
Crap quality is typical of cheap TV productions, e.g. Hanna-Barbera and some anime in the seventies and eighties.
Spielberg did a great job on Animaniacs, so it is possible to do well.
Many modern cartoons are 3D-rendered, and I feel a bit "uncanny-valley" about them. That may be, because I was raised on the classics.
> My experience, is that the ones made in the 1970s and 1980s had crap quality.
Because a lot of it turned into a marketing machine thanks to GI Joe. Cheap cartoons enabled kid oriented commercial slots to sell ad time for junk food and toys. The 80's were notorious for throwing all sorts of action figure selling ideas at the wall. Every 80's kid had some cartoon merchandise toy crap.
If the goal is sparking the imagination, these flaws are often a feature, not a bug. You have to do a little bit of work to complete the picture. That's also why the original book is almost always better than the fully rendered movie inspired by the book. No matter the budget.
You have things like Homestar Runner that were animated in Flash.
Animation tools are just part of the story-telling tools, and just because something is visually beautiful in stills (or even animated) doesn't mean that the story is well told, or the tools well used.
And often 'bad graphics' or whatever you want to call it can actually help with the story, just like low-def TV, because it covers up things that are unimportant without drawing attention to it.
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
The Star Wars trilogy wasn't great cinema, but the amount of time we spent playing with improvised light sabers and trying to move objects with the Force attests to the imaginative possibilities behind it.
it was visually ground breaking though, and there was something strange because if you look at movies of that era, a lot of attempts at space action fantasy existed, but they all looked crudely crafted and not believable. there was an alignment of talent, from VFX to audio, to music that made the whole thing hold
I think Nintendo figured this out years ago. Their games are not graphically cutting-edge, but they still sell like crazy.
nintendo has distilled their own flavor of "disney magic". their flagship games are polished beyond belief, the art direction is a careful choice. they hit the borderlands bullseye over and over - not particularly cutting edge to a gfx professional but unique, cohesive, and beloved.
A key there (and it sounds like in the OP) is that art direction is an order of magnitude more important than graphics technology, especially these days
A lot of the cartoons I watched as a kid had excellent animation, and a lot was very primitive 3D rendering that looks horrible in comparison. As a kid, I didn't even notice!
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.
Recently I reminisced about Blender foundations first(?) effort, Tears of Steel, with the script like "Look, Celia, we have to follow our passions; you have your robotics and I just want to be awesome in space!" - "Why don’t you just admit that you’re freaked out by my robot hand?!"
It's not about the textures and shadows.
"Tears of Steel" was the fourth Blender Open Movie project. The first one was 2006's "Elephants Dream", then "Big Buck Bunny" and "Sintel".
From the more recent ones I highly recommend "Sprite Fright".
I don't know what they've been up to after Tears of Steel but the primary mission of the older Blender Foundation movies was to further the tech, e.g. motion tracking.
The shaky camera is a deal breaker for me. Doesn't matter if it's animated or not, TV series or film. Shaky camera is an instant switch off for me.
Weird, my actual 10 year old was quickly bored and lost interest.
same - 11-year old. movie buff too.
It's almost like different people have different tastes or something.. ;-)
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?
Interesting. I loved Flow and I'm glad the stars aligned for it on this particular occasion. This article [1] lists a bunch of other Oscar-related firsts:
* Gints Zilbalodis, who is 30 years old, is the youngest director to win the Oscar for best animated feature.
* Flow is the first fully-European produced and funded film to win the feture animation Oscar.
* Flow is the first dialogue-less film to win the feature animation Oscar.
* Flow, made for under $4 million, is by far the lowest-budget film to ever win the category.
It also says the winner of the animated short category, In the Shadow of the Cypress, was unexpected since the Iranian filmmakers couldn't do any of the usual in-person campaigning of Academy voters due to visa problems.
[1] https://www.cartoonbrew.com/awards/underdogs-win-latvias-flo...
A couple things:
1. The academy has had a significant increase of young voters in the past 10 years or so. Generally speaking, young voters are more likely to take animation as a "serious" medium.
2. These interviews were always somewhat overstated. Of course some voters have stupid rationales, but I don't think this dominates the academy.
3. Disney's Inside Out 2 was nowhere close to winning the award this year - Flow's biggest competition was The Wild Robot, which did gross far more than Inside Out 2, but far below Inside Out 2.
If you look at the past couple years, The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli) won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Elemental nowhere close) in 2023, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Turning Red nowhere close) in 2022, etc.
I'm curious what year you're thinking about above. Perhaps Toy Story 4 over Klaus in 2019?
> Flow's biggest competition was The Wild Robot, which did gross far more than Inside Out 2, but far below Inside Out 2.
Exactly the same as Inside Out 2 then?
(I'm guessing it was far more than Flow but less than Inside Out 2?)
4. The results can still be valid if there’s a lot of random noise in the sample. There are about 10,000 voters here. If 9,000 vote at random and 1,000 watch the films and vote on merit, there’s about a 2% chance of getting a different result than if all 10,000 watched and voted on merit.
I would guess this is, to some degree, a generational shift. The Animated category has only existed for ~30 years and was born from the resentment many in the academy felt toward Beauty and the Beast being nominated alongside supposedly serious films for Best Picture. Each generation following that one has grown up with a more diverse slate of animated films available.
The Oscars are the slowest possible reflection of social change, and I’m sure the perspective you share is still held my many members, but this win holds out some hope for sure.
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.
Reminds me of when Jethro Tull won best Hard Rock/Metal category, beating out Metallica and AC/DC.
I adored Flow. It's hard to say it was truly "better" than Inside Out 2. I think part of the calculation has to be that everyone expected Pixar to deliver something top notch so it only really met expectations. Flow was made by a no-name team from Latvia and was really something unique and interesting. I went into it kinda blind with no expectations and was blown away.
I didn't think inside out 2 was a very good movie.
It had good ideas but didn't do very well with them (contrary to the first movie, which was great). I'm not surprised a movie which wasn't "just a sequel" managed to beat Moana and IO2.
The title of the movie is perfect. It’s more of the same. Which is still very good, but lacking in anything novel.
I was also disappointed by inside out 2. I thought it followed the story beats of the first one a bit too closely. Flow was the better film.
This is my point though. Inside Out 2 suffered from high expectations. If Pixar never existed and Inside Out 2 came from an unknown studio it would have blown you away.
Exactly. Pixar is somewhat a victim of its own success, but in this case Inside Out 2 is just Inside Out again - none of the additions or developments are really surprising.
And that's not bad! Sometimes you really do just want more of the same - after all, many wildly successful TV shows are just the same story, told differently each episode.
Flow wildly beat expectations which already gives it a leg up, but it was "new and weird" enough that I bet more of the reviewers actually watched it vs Inside Out 2 or other big-name movies.
Even the tagline of "feature length movie with no dialogue that's actually good" is enough to get people interested.
Eh not for me. It was just meh, nothing to do with expectations, which were already low from my side.
Flow was a critical favorite, sometimes that matters at the Oscars.
They aren't required to watch them, but the voters do all get screeners. They at least have the opportunity to watch it, regardless of whether they've seen it in the theater. They don't vote just for what they've heard of.
The Academy has a reputation for seeking "artistic merit" even at a cost of good entertainment. They're hoping to advance something that didn't do well at the box office. Sometimes that means giving awards to films that turn out to be dogs, but sometimes they manage to promote things that deserve attention.
A lot of Oscar-bait gets a small release at the end of the year, to qualify it for the Oscars. If it gets a nomination, they'll use that as part of a wider campaign later. That's why they send out screeners: they know that many members won't have had a chance to see it in the theater.
Could they have heard of it en masse because of its success at the Golden Globes?
Historically the Golden Globes are the biggest predictor of the Oscars, so, yes, but then you have to ask how it won the Golden Globe lol
I suspect as I said elsewhere that "feature length movie with no dialogue that's actually good" was enough to get people watching it, even seeking it out. We're more than a hundred years out from silent movies, so it's a curiosity by that metric alone.
And then it turns out to be actually good!
It's similar to the Lego Movie in that respect, everyone had assumptions about what it was and then it went and was well done and hit you right in the feels.
> I suspect as I said elsewhere that "feature length movie with no dialogue that's actually good" was enough to get people watching it, even seeking it out. We're more than a hundred years out from silent movies, so it's a curiosity by that metric alone
There have been 4 other Best Animated nominees with no dialogue.
• "Shaun the Sheep Movie" (2015) with 99% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average critic rating of 8.1/10
• "The Red Turtle" (2016) with 93% on RT and an average critic rating 8.10/10
• "A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon" (2019) with 96% on RT with an average critic rating of 7.5/10
• "Robot Dreams" (2023) with 98% on RT and an average critic rating of 8.4/10
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.
Almost reminiscentof Hitchcock only using intertitles sparingly, instead letting the images convey the story.
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.
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.
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.
"I would like to thank Blender, and Flexo, and Fry."
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.
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/v1/58586fa5ebbd1a...
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.
I think people are specifically referring to the movie not looking technically impressive, not that Blender isn't capable of technically impressive renders at all.
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
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.
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.
Blender comes with two renderers: Cycles for production rendering, and Eevee for near-real time preview.
This movie was rendered with the latter.
Like any 3D package, you can also install other renderers.
So any perceived deficit in picture quality here is more to do with budget than some limitation of Blender.
Yeah, the real time stuff is pretty solid in blender but for very high image quality / realistic prerendering, blender is still missing a lot of the professional/proprietaries tools that gives the last 10% of polish in big budget productions (photorealism). The community has done a great job in last 10 years but there's still a lot of technical tools locked behind something like max/maya ecosystems professional paywall that most people eventually transitions to for "serious" industry work because pipelines are hard to change. At least that's the state a few years 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.
there are parts of Flow that definitely look incredible imo
Recent and related:
First time a Blender-made production has won the Golden Globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620656 - Jan 2025 (49 comments)
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.
This is the first movie I took my 3 yo kids to watch in a theater. My wife and I are FOSS enthusiasts.
Animation of Flow (Blender Conference 2024) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxz6p-QATfs
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.
Lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point is that this amazing story could be produced, as a finished movie, by a team that only needed to raise about $3M. Precisely how much of that is because they used Blender is still not clear to me, but the importance of Blender's use here is that it opens the door to equivalently great (or even better!) story telling on (relatively) low budgets ($3M is still a lot to raise, it seems to me). This story would never have been made if it needed $30M or $300M to make.
>" but the importance of Blender's use here is that it opens the door to equivalently great (or even better!) story telling on (relatively) low budgets"
I agree that what they have achieved for "only $3M" is nothing but amazing. I have no idea how much money was saved by using Blender.
> I could not give a flying fuck what it was rendered with , tech level is not impressive.
It's pretty impressive to me that something of Flow's quality could be created with free software that's avilable to anyone with an internet connection. There are a lot of highly creative people out in the world without massive amounts of money for expensive hardware/software. It's exciting for the future of animation, and I hope all the news stories talking about Flow being made with Blender will inspire more people to give it a try and see what they can do with it.
Loved the film and was so happy to see it win. First nomination for Latvia I believe.
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.
I’m very pleased to see this, Flow was such a lovely film. I didn’t realise it was made with blender!
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.
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.
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.
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?)
My kingdom for a hyphen!
You owe @dang your kingdom :)
I fixed it myself so perhaps I can claim half of the kingdom and half of the horse, please
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.
That's the thing with narrative art. It doesn't click the same way, or at all, with everybody. And there is nothing wrong with that. Art that tries too hard to be appealing to everybody ends up being tepid.
To me, for example, with the bits I've heard about the plot, Flow's story doesn't sound particularly appealing. But I'm over the Moon with the news of how it was made, and the fact that budding movie producers won't have to declare bankruptcy after paying Maxon for software licenses. And because the financial barrier is now slightly lower, it means there will be slightly less scripts-by-committee, and slightly better art for non-mainstream audiences.
What isn’t there to get? it’s a dead simple concept
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.
> There's an unexplained great flood, unexplained human ruins
And that's the point. Perhaps you didn't like the movie because you are used to movies that every single detail needs to have a meaning and you were expecting that everything would be eventually explained. In this movie, things just happen and its story is not about them, but about how the characters react to them. Just like real life.
Specially for animals like the main characters. From a perspective of a pet, it's unexplained why its owners leave and return to their homes everyday at the same time; it's also unexplained why they can't pee everywhere. But they can manage to follow their lives and adapt to those unexplained facts without needing to understanding them.
And for me, this is what makes this movie great. It puts me in that perspective of an animal in a human world, where nothing really seems to make sense and it's pointless to try to find a meaning. And that's the opposite of <insert here any mainstream movie with animals as main characters> where we try to give a human perspective of what happens in their lives.
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.
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.
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”.
That's the whole point. That it's not explained and you are left with tantalizing questions. It's ok to not like it. Not everyone likes the same things.
> stork-like bird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarybird
Your brain is just on one end of a spectrum that doesn't really respond to the same things as some other people's brains. There are plenty of people who are moved by things that have nothing to do with plot, and would never say something like "made up symbolism". Images, sounds, and symbols evoke mental connections and feelings in many people. A painting has no plot, an abstract painting is made up symbols. Many people find incredible depth and beauty in these things. Some people find that David Lynch's work is the most impressive tapping of human dream like subconscious ever achieved, and others absolutely do not understand it at all.
Why do you expect everyone to come away with the same message? Watching it, I thought about friendship, growth, climate change, death. Other people will see something else in it.
Environmental is another form of storytelling. Not everything needs to be explained in detail.
Cooperation in the face of adversity and rising water levels == very moving and profound.
What's not to understand?
/s
I would love to see the day when Autodesk is sold to some scumbag bigCo for peanuts.
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.
What would be your defining criteria for "best animated film" ?
The overall package -- plot, characters, visual style. There are so many movies that nail all three, but Flow is weak in every category, IMO.
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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/
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?!
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.
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.