[HN Gopher] Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar
___________________________________________________________________
Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar
Author : boguscoder
Score : 738 points
Date : 2025-03-03 01:17 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| My kingdom for a hyphen!
| anamexis wrote:
| You owe @dang your kingdom :)
| boguscoder wrote:
| I fixed it myself so perhaps I can claim half of the kingdom
| and half of the horse, please
| kylecazar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "I would like to thank Blender, and Flexo, and Fry."
| neoecos wrote:
| This is the first movie I took my 3 yo kids to watch in a
| theater. My wife and I are FOSS enthusiasts.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Loved the film and was so happy to see it win. First nomination
| for Latvia I believe.
| madars wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Flow was a critical favorite, sometimes that matters at the
| Oscars.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Reminds me of when Jethro Tull won best Hard Rock/Metal
| category, beating out Metallica and AC/DC.
| stuart78 wrote:
| 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.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| The title of the movie is perfect. It's more of the same.
| Which is still very good, but lacking in anything novel.
| CmdrKrool wrote:
| 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...
| Timwi wrote:
| Could they have heard of it en masse because of its success at
| the Golden Globes?
| dkh wrote:
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| > 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
| chillee wrote:
| 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?
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > 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?)
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| lemming wrote:
| I'm very pleased to see this, Flow was such a lovely film. I
| didn't realise it was made with blender!
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great
| community example of this.
| ad-astra wrote:
| 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...
| sbarre wrote:
| That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a
| long time.
|
| I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?
| remify wrote:
| Second title should have been named the Book of Job IMO
| ad-astra wrote:
| Sure why not, updated.
| ad-astra wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out! And yeah, I'm not expecting
| it to gain much traction, just having fun with it.
| zoky wrote:
| Any embarrassingly parallel task can scale almost infinitely
| by throwing more resources at it.
| touisteur wrote:
| 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.
| Doxin wrote:
| 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.
| sznio wrote:
| 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
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| orlp wrote:
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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.
| leonidasv wrote:
| 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.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| 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.
| Neywiny wrote:
| 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.
| deng wrote:
| 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.
| CSSer wrote:
| This is arguably true for all director's cuts and remasters
| ever released.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| jancsika wrote:
| 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.)
| alanvillalobos wrote:
| Somewhat in this vein is Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi
| - The Four Seasons. I liked it, but I am definitely not a
| purist.
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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
| pier25 wrote:
| Weren't Blender working on a more efficient cycles renderer?
| pilaf wrote:
| 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/
| pier25 wrote:
| 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...
| eurekin wrote:
| 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.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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
| zo1 wrote:
| 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.
| Funes- wrote:
| 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.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The look is scruffy.
|
| The story is not, and the visuals are sufficient to tell the
| story.
| sepositus wrote:
| 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.
| maxglute wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| WhatThisGuySaid wrote:
| 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.
| Clamchop wrote:
| 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.
| maxglute wrote:
| 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.
| j3s wrote:
| there are parts of Flow that definitely look incredible imo
| viccis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A takeaway may be that cutting-edge rendering doesn't really
| matter for cartoon-stylized films, especially for kid viewers
| stvltvs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| stvltvs wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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
| Hoasi wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I think Nintendo figured this out years ago. Their games are
| not graphically cutting-edge, but they still sell like crazy.
| Liquix wrote:
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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
| Rendello wrote:
| 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!
| guelo wrote:
| Weird, my actual 10 year old was quickly bored and lost
| interest.
| bdangubic wrote:
| same - 11-year old. movie buff too.
| sbarre wrote:
| It's almost like different people have different tastes or
| something.. ;-)
| watt wrote:
| 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.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| "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".
| UncleEntity wrote:
| 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.
| deskr wrote:
| 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.
| namuol wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Animation of Flow (Blender Conference 2024)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxz6p-QATfs
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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?!
| dkh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| FpUser wrote:
| >" 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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.
| guelo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What isn't there to get? it's a dead simple concept
| guelo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| > stork-like bird
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarybird
| tnolet wrote:
| 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.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| 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.
| ErneX wrote:
| Environmental is another form of storytelling. Not
| everything needs to be explained in detail.
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| > 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.
| mppm wrote:
| Cooperation in the face of adversity and rising water
| levels == very moving and profound.
|
| What's not to understand?
|
| /s
| dsign wrote:
| 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.
| danbmil wrote:
| I would love to see the day when Autodesk is sold to some scumbag
| bigCo for peanuts.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Lol
| mppm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What would be your defining criteria for "best animated film" ?
| mppm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-03 23:02 UTC)