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.
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.
Don’t watch it because it won an Oscar, watch it because it is a beautiful, sweet movie about animals helping each other.
It’s a very simple film without much depth to be honest. Memoir of a snail was far better.
How much “depth” do you expect to get out a group of animals acting “mostly” natural and without a single line of human dialog? With those limitations, I think it excelled. There were even a couple tearjerker moments, for me at least.
Not having dialogue has nothing to do with. While the animals can only be so complex (if acting “naturally”), the storytelling is not limited to just that. They could’ve probably told more about the world with the elements and places the animals found. The animation was pretty crappy at some points too. The dog for example was not very well done.
Regardless of all of this, I’m not saying it should have been different, I only wanted to express that this movie is not worthy of an oscar when compared to something like Memoir Of A Snail, imo.