from Hacker News

Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

by boguscoder on 3/3/25, 1:17 AM with 140 comments

• by jsheard on 3/3/25, 3:35 AM

  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.

• by legitster on 3/3/25, 4:32 AM

  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!

• by tzs on 3/3/25, 3:16 AM

  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?

• by lucideng on 3/3/25, 2:29 PM

  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.

• by viccis on 3/3/25, 3:45 AM

  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.

• by owenpalmer on 3/3/25, 3:09 AM

  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.

• by kylecazar on 3/3/25, 2:35 AM

  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.

• by maxglute on 3/3/25, 3:41 AM

  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.

• by dang on 3/3/25, 3:35 AM

  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)

• by qwertox on 3/3/25, 3:50 PM

  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.

• by neoecos on 3/3/25, 2:52 AM

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

• by FpUser on 3/3/25, 7:15 AM

  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.

• by ndsipa_pomu on 3/3/25, 10:34 AM

  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.

• by febin on 3/3/25, 6:07 AM

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

• by LostMyLogin on 3/3/25, 3:16 AM

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

• by lemming on 3/3/25, 3:26 AM

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

• by dismalaf on 3/3/25, 5:13 PM

  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.

• by microflash on 3/3/25, 4:06 PM

  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.

• by namuol on 3/3/25, 5:09 AM

  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?)

• by edflsafoiewq on 3/3/25, 2:22 AM

  My kingdom for a hyphen!

• by harlanji on 3/3/25, 4:56 PM

  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.

• by guelo on 3/3/25, 7:50 AM

  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.

• by danbmil on 3/3/25, 8:16 AM

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

• by mppm on 3/3/25, 1:07 PM

  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.

• by ChrisArchitect on 3/3/25, 6:12 AM

  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?!