"Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but having an alternative which is viable on a shoestring budget is very valuable.
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.
"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.
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.)
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
Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.
https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render...
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 think I confused it with the Eevee Next project released last year.
https://code.blender.org/2024/07/eevee-next-generation-in-bl...
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.
The movie doesn’t look real, but it also doesn’t act real either.
Seems like a fluke, though.
The story is not, and the visuals are sufficient to tell the story.
Since they're not going crazy with effects it seems like a good compromise
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!
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.
Crap quality is typical of cheap TV productions, e.g. Hanna-Barbera and some anime in the seventies and eighties.
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.
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.
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.
It's not about the textures and shadows.
From the more recent ones I highly recommend "Sprite Fright".
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?
* 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...
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?
Exactly the same as Inside Out 2 then?
(I'm guessing it was far more than Flow but less than Inside Out 2?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
We did come a long way
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.
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.
First time a Blender-made production has won the Golden Globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620656 - Jan 2025 (49 comments)
More seriously, I really enjoyed the film and it shows the importance of getting the story and emotional connection right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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 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.
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.
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.
And that discomfort that the commenter felt is what I felt when watching Ghibli for the first time.
What's not to understand?
/s
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?!
I think to most people, the film and this video look like polar opposites.
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.
