One of year's best animated films was entirely made in Blender

We mentioned Gints Zilbalodis’ new animated film Flow as one of our highlights of Annecy 2024. The movie, which follows the story of a cat in the wake of disastrous global flooding, won this year’s jury award and audience prize as well as the best music award.

With release now upcoming, more has emerged about the making of the stunning silent animation. And it turns out it was entirely made in Blender, an open-source tool that's long been our choice as the best free 3D modelling software. 

FLOW Trailer (2024) - YouTube

Watch On

Flow (Straume in Latvian) might have no dialogue, but the expressive artistic style speaks volumes in this lyrical story of a group of animals helping each other survive in a flooded world. Even Guillermo del Toro was blown away when a clip from Flow premiered at Cannes Un Certain Regard 2024 back in May, tweeting “If I could wish for the future of animation, these images would be its magnificent, breathtaking start.” It's incredible that it was made by a small team using Blender alone (it was rendered in EEVEE, Blender's realtime render engine).

Flow - Clip 1 - YouTube

Watch On

Some have compared the fell of the movie to BlueTwelve Studio and Annapurna's 2022 video game Stray. The mountains and lakes and the detail of the light and reflections on the water are just gorgeous, and the animals' personalities seem to shine through in what could be the best animation of the year.

Flow will be released on 30 October.

Meanwhile, one Blender artist has been forced to prove his work wasn't AI. To learn more about the software, see our roundup of Blender tutorials and our Blender review.