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 liked the movie, but my (small) kids cried a lot during and after the movie.
Hahaha yeah same, was not expecting it to get on top of them so easily.
I feel like young kids these days are desensitized to scary imagery (ghosts and ghouls and blood and guts) but take jeopardy or peril really hard.
First time my 3 year old saw The Lego Movie he got very upset at the part where they were falling at the end of the Wild West scene
Wanna watch it with my 6 and 9 year olds soon. Is it that sad?! I skipped through it and it looked nice.
Its not that its sad so much as there is a lot of stress and peril and the ending isn’t really happy or sad. Its a complicated movie that falls outside the disney format of “bad thing happens, good guys badn together, day is saved and everyone is fine”.
It feels like its exploring themes of loss and moving forward. But theres some moments where I genuinely have no idea what happened.
I kinda like exposing my kids to that though. The movie didnt spoon feed you answers and encourages you to draw your own conclusions. My 10 year old was hooked by the halfway mark but my 5 year old was like this the entire time 🫣
It’s not sad, but there’s a lot of anxiety inducing moments.