Hacker Cinema
Flow
Straume
2024 · Film · 85 min
Directed by Gints Zilbalodis
AdventureAnimationFamilyFantasy
A solitary cat, displaced by a great flood, finds refuge on a boat with various species and must navigate the challenges of adapting to a transformed world together.
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44 comments on Hacker News
The Oscar-winning animated feature movie “Flow” was made with Blender.
Just wanted to second "Flow" - undoubtedly one of the best animated movies of all time! Give it a try if you can, you won't regret it.
There's also the 2024 film Flow. Really delightful movie, and is impressively rendered using Eevee (Blender's real-time renderer) and not Cycles (Blender's path-traced renderer).
Flow is good filmmaking expressed through low-tech production, which is totally valid, but it doing a lot with a little isn't going to stop Disney from one-upping themselves with the next Zootopia movie so Blender needs to handle that angle too if it's going to become a catch-all solution for all kinds of production.
I'm sure "major project" is a subjective label, but Flow made headlines earlier this year with an Academy Award (Best Animated Feature) and Golden Globe (Best Animated Feature Film)
https://flow.movie/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZccxuj2RY
https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis/
Mid-way down:
> ... At the 97th Academy Awards, Flow won Best Animated Feature and was also nominated for Best International Feature Film as Latvia's submission ...
I've seen the movie and I'd say it's enjoyable for kids and adults.
We just had an animated movie about animals[1] with zero dialog win an Oscar.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
Advances in AI generating 3D models do get me really excited because there's an "old" tech we have, since the pre- AI craze, that works very well: and that's rendering photorealistic (or non-photorealistic but artistic, like in the "Flow" animated film) from 3D scenes.
But then we need to fill these 3D scenes.
Generating 2D pictures and 2D movies doesn't excite me much. But generating a 3D scene which I can then open from Blender or whatever, modify stuff, change the camera angle, lighting, models, etc. is going to open so many possibilities.
It's exactly the same for audio: I don't want a wav file generated. I want all the individual tracks that I can open in a DAW.
Both are coming. I'm 100% sure about it.
The animals behave like animals at the beginning of the movie, but differently by the end. That’s clearly a choice by the filmmakers.
I think Flow is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years, in part because of how it chooses to depart from reality.
I think it also helped that I saw it in a theater which I find far more immersive than watching at home.
Just to toss in a couple of 'dumb comic book movies' that hit different, the two (so far) Spiderverse films. They put Flow to shame both visually and emotionally (at least for me).
> Flow (2024)
"Flow" was a huge disappointment for me. I couldn't get past the animation jerkiness and overall unrealistic look. I have two cats, and cats simply don't move like pictured: while most of the keyframes were perfectly fine, the transitions between them were off, which completely broke it for me. Heck, "Stray" (the video game) had much more realistically moving cat than "Flow" and I think it's supposed to be the other way around. I get that it was "indie" stuff done on a relatively small budget, but those broken movements became sort of an uncanny valley for me.
I guess, I also had wrong expectations from the beginning. The movie was heavily advertised as non-verbal, so - naturally - I expected it to portray the behaviors of non-human consciousness (with slight allowances for plot reasons, sure). And then the animals behaved as if they were unquestionably and heavily anthropopsychic.
To sum it up, "animals don't move like this and don't behave like this" paired with some invalid pre-expectations, sadly, was too much to break my suspension of disbelief and ruin the movie for me.
But yeah, it's certainly not a "mindless banter in between sex and explosions".
Perhaps you can share some examples of the films you are referring as "mindless banter in between sex and explosions". I'm not sure that description really fits most of the films coming out recently. If you said, "Dumb comic book films", I would maybe agree with you, but there isn't typically any sex in those so I assume you are not referring to them.
Covid halted the production of a lot of movies, and changed how others were made. It also shut down theaters. So, "since covid", is really talking about before and after an era. Kind of like saying, "since 9/11", in terms of the impact on culture. A lot of creativity has moved from the movie theaters to streaming services and from films to more episodic content.
However, here is a short list of films worth seeing (imo) since covid (2019).
Zone of Interest (2023) The Holdovers (2023) Parasite (2019) Dune (2021) Dune Part Two (2024) Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) 1917 (2019) The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) The Substance (2024) Palm Springs (2020) Oppenheimer (2023) The Lighthouse (2019) Hundreds of Beavers (2022) Barbarian (2022) Flow (2024)
The "just a tool like any other" perspective can't account for how much talentless slop is in practice created by AI.
Look at the work spotlighted by Google to promote their new Flow tool: https://x.com/GoogleLabs/status/1925596282661327073 . This is a garbage imitation of a Guy Ritchie film or a Jose Cuervo ad (maybe more the latter).
Instead of being a tool for creatives it has empowered a number of grifters to churn out more and more "content" bypassing any concern about craft and formal restrictions that help generate creative work. The work that is most often created with the help of AI is not creative, it's a bland, tasteless simulacrum of creativity.
For sure seems they are likely deliberately riding on the fame of the movie. I too instantly thought it is some kind of Flow movie animation collaboration similarily like Flow is represented in Blender 4.4 splash screen or is even their mascot.
I'm surprised no one has yet to mention the use of the name "Flow", which is also the title of the 2025 Oscar winning animated movie, built using Blender. [1]
This naming seems very confusing, as I originally thought there must be some connection. But I don't think there is.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43237273
The ad for Flow would be much better if they laid off the swirly and wavy effects, and focused on realism.
Soon, you should be able to put in a screenplay and a cast, and get a movie out. Then, "Google Sequels" - generates a sequel for any movie.
Looks like a really nice and polished project!
A note to the author -- if you ever considered going open source, you could use the same strategy used by Ton Roosendaal to open source Blender:
In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.
In October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL. Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to manage development, and the project kept growing from there. Today, Blender is one of the most popular 3D creation tools, used by professionals, hobbyists, and even studios.
Being free and open source allowed Blender to power countless creative projects, including the 2025 Oscar-winning film Flow.
This would've been much harder if the tool had stayed behind a paywall.
`The movie "Flow" cost approximately $3.7 million to $4 million to produce` - big budget for almost one person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
$36 million dollars and an Academy Award. A l m o s t done by just one person. And entirely with open source software.
The guy's previous movie was a true one-man show but didn't really get screenings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_(2019_film)
It's fantastic.
I just watched Kitsune, thanks for sharing.
It reminds me why Flow was so good.
Flow was great because I could see the shader artifacts. It was the opposite of a Disney model, it was not polished and perfect.
That's why I loved it. Disney would never do a movie with a plot like Flow. They would write and rewrite it and it would be a perfect example of humanity, but totally devoid of the humanity behind it.
It is ironic that this new coming wave of AI generated (or AI assisted) films feel like they have more human craftmanship than Disney films, when honestly it is the opposite. Disney has incredible and brilliant animators, but that is all crushed behind the merchandising and gross behemoth of the Disney corporation.
I used to love seeing independent films. Those art house theaters really only exist in places like Portland, OR these days. But, I'm excited about the next wave of film because it'll permit small storytelling, and that's going to be great.
As the previous poster has implied, An animatic can evolve directly from a storyboard. The frames of the storyboard are placed directly on a timeline (e.g. premier) and sometimes given a few animations (e.g. zoom, pan etc) and annotations. As the animation progresses, rough 3D renders (sometimes called flip books) can be dropped onto this timeline. In this way, the final movie can evolve directly from the animatic.
What made Flow unusual is that they bypassed the storyboard almost entirely, which is unusual for a feature film. One rational is that the movie features significant and lengthy camera motion shots. Camera motion is very difficult to capture in a storyboard.
At a student level, another motivation for lessening the importance of the storyboard is that they require not insignificant drawing skills in order to do effectively. Even animation students cannot be guaranteed to draw well, and the number of student filmmakers who can draw is vanishingly small.
I don't think the title reflects the contents of the article. I believe a more accurate title would be "Blender, the tool behind an Oscar winning movie, releases a new version", because as far as I can tell the movie referenced that won the Oscar (Flow[0]), was using LTS version 3.6[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) [1] https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis
It's probably already been said in a thousand other discussions, but Flow is a really good movie, highly advised
Blender is cheaper than Maya and Autodesk Nuke... and accessible to every artist.
Thus, it is a very common tool choice behind the scenes (targeting OpenEXR frame sequences and post-render compositing layers), but the color profiles are usually still done with professional video editing software. The OpenEXR format offers a few tricks for cleaning up lighting without re-rendering a scene.
Blenders problem is it is perpetually Beta, and plugin ecosystems can be unreliable in a production setting. The film Flow was a miracle to pull off with a tool with dozens of known broken features every "release".
It is like any other tool, in that most of its features take a lot of time to master. For low-poly game assets, it is totally worth a donation. =3
> Blender should be able to do everything you need, quite comfortably.
Hell, Blender just made a movie that won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/movies/flow-movie-pets-oscars.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3E4.xYk4.49sK87gtbZxp&smid=url-share
Yea, Latvia is actually doing quite alright culturally for it's small size. We have multiple NBA players, Oscar winning producer ( movie Flow ) and bronze in hockey world championship in 2023. All that for a population bit below 2 million is not bad, sadly none of that will matter if we get invaded.
Exactly. Pixar is somewhat a victim of its own success, but in this case Inside Out 2 is just Inside Out again - none of the additions or developments are really surprising.
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.
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.
The overall package -- plot, characters, visual style. There are so many movies that nail all three, but Flow is weak in every category, IMO.
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.
That's the thing with narrative art. It doesn't click the same way, or at all, with everybody. And there is nothing wrong with that. Art that tries too hard to be appealing to everybody ends up being tepid.
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.
I was also disappointed by inside out 2. I thought it followed the story beats of the first one a bit too closely. Flow was the better film.
You may not care, and you don't have to, but certainly it means a lot to the Blender Foundation, who for 23 years have been actively working on something free & open-source, and now finally it is in the big leagues.
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.
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!
First two nominations, in fact - Flow also got nominated for Best International Feature Film which went to Brazil's "I'm Still Here." Flow is a beautiful film and I can wholeheartedly recommend HN audience to watch it. It also has 97% audience rating and 98% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Interesting. I loved Flow and I'm glad the stars aligned for it on this particular occasion. This article [1] lists a bunch of other Oscar-related firsts:
* 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-flow-and-irans-in-the-shadow-of-the-cypress-win-oscars-246181.html
I’m very pleased to see this, Flow was such a lovely film. I didn’t realise it was made with blender!
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?
"Flow, the animated feature film following the mystical journey of a dark grey cat and his companions, is the manifestation of Blender’s mission, where a small, independent team with a limited budget is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide, and achieve recognition with over 60 awards, including a Golden Globe for Best Animation and two Oscar nominations.
In this interview, Gints Zilbalodis, writer and director (and more!) of the film, shares how Blender was instrumental in the creation of the film."
Here are more details about the movie if you are curious:
- https://hollymotion.com/en/flow_cinema_blender_en/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw-a7buP4KA
Amazing movie by the way. It's been in cinemas here in Latvia for 5 months already and been sold out ever since.
Strong agree: Upstream Color is poetry
Stanley Kubrick did something similar in `2001: A Space Odyssey`. In a scene where staff were being transported in a taxi... on the moon... 100% of the dialog is meaningless. They're discussing the merits of this or that sandwich, not how wonderful the Earth looks from space, or overcoming technical challenges.
It's so refreshing to be living in an environment vs being spoon fed.
Even better is very old or even silent movies ("M" is fantastic: modern-ish thriller from 1931 where sound is a character; Metropolis)
Also dialog-less movies: `Koyaanisqatsi` is incredibly beautiful and has a specific plot, even if there's no understandable dialog nor words.
In theaters _right now_ is `Flow`. No dialog, and no _human_ characters! It's all animated cats and dogs and other animals. It's startling how directly the characters transmit their goals and agenda and emotions.
> You can't do 100% "show, don't tell" unless your movie is 15 hours long
You most certainly can, though it relies on trusting the audience.
Flow (2024)
Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
I think the best modern productions are now the series rather than the films as there's so much more time to tell the story and have room for characters to breathe etc.
Just look at the artistry and story-telling skill displayed in both seasons of Arcane - there's so many brilliant examples of "showing, not telling" on display there.
As a counter-example, I enjoyed watching the "Flow" film the other day - an animated film about a cat (and other animals) trying to survive a flood and there's not even a single word in the entire film.