It was a strong year for Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations, and an underdog triumphed. At the 97th annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles last night, Flow beat competition from Pixar’s Inside Out 2, DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot and Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
Gints Zilbalodis tale about a cat in a flooded world missed out on the Oscar for Best International Feature Film but still became Latvia’s first Oscar win. And it was surely also the first Oscar winner to be made entirely in the free 3D modelling software Blender, cementing the open-source program’s place among the best animation software.
Flow was one of our highlights of Annecy 2024, and it still seems incredible that it was made by a small team using Blender alone. It was rendered in EEVEE, Blender’s realtime render engine.
Gints thanked Blender when accepting the award. Speaking to press afterwards, he said: "Any kid now has tools that are used to make now Academy Award-winning films, so I think we’re going to see all kinds of exciting films being made from kids who might not have had a chance to do this before.
The movie was really well done. It’s a simpler animation style so don’t expect Pixar level stuff, but the story and art direction are great.
Awesome to see Blender getting the love it deserves!
Recognition but not love. They will have no money.
And it’s European! 🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺
Well-deserved win! Watched this in the cinema a few weeks back. What immediately struck me about the beautiful art style is that it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game than from a dreamworks/pixar studio – and it was incredibly refreshing! Also, for a movie where water plays a big role, the fluid rendering was absolutely breathtaking. I could almost smell the warm plastic air of a GPU giving its all.
i really wanna watch this in the cinema
I liked the movie, but my (small) kids cried a lot during and after the movie.
But the thumbnail, isn’t that just the album cover from Nirvana’s Nevermind?
With a huge drippin hog
Psshht, mine’s bigger.
I’m excited to check this out. My tastes rarely align with those of the Academy, but this looks like it could be a really beautiful film and these kind of efforts deserve support.
Excellent!
Me and my mother watched it a few weeks ago knowing nothing about it and it was really good!
Nice! Have it on my watchlist hopefully I can see it soon :3
