Reviews

Third short film by the Amsterdam-based Blender Foundation. Sintel is partly meant to promote the open source animation software Blender and to be used for demo-purposes (3d, 4k)by it's sponsors.

But it's far more than a very crafty demo. Script and storyline are clearly worked out on a elaborate scale, comprising three different levels. One might see it as a fantasy-action movie, but it also packs a coming-of-age sideline and a sobering life-lesson.

Loner Sintel (Dutch for Cinder)befriends a baby dragon an nurtures it, until it's snatched from her in a dramatic scene. The quest to find the dragon is somewhat rushed in a montage and throughout the movie some movement seems unnatural, but the amount of detail in props and background is amazing. Double so, because this was made by just 14 animators, script editor, technician and director (and numerous members of the Blender community who made props and scenes online) in just over a year, at a total cost of 400.000 euro.

In addition to that rather excellent summary, Pat & Mat are very well known in the Netherlands as 'Buurman & Buurman' (Neighbour & neighbor). At first they were broad casted in their original format (without speech), 49 episodes were re-broad casted in the early nineties overdubbed with ad-hoc voices provided by Dutch actors Simon van Leeuwen and Kees Prins. This added in no small way to the humor of the original series. For nostalgic purposes the original Czech title 'Aje to' ('that's all') was turned in to their payoff at the end of each episode.

The series has had a an amazing number of reruns. Buurman and Buurman still has numerous fan clubs on the internet. And in 2007 'Buurman & Buurman' was voted the most popular item in the fully packed Sunday morning show Villa Achterwerk, the best-watched children's program of the time. DVD's of all seasons are readily available and just now (march 2009) a 6-dvd-box with all 63 episodes is in the sjop.

To me the most amazing accomplishment of the series is, it appeals to all ages, which is quite uncommon for animation. I ran into a party in a dorm once, where Buurman and Buurman had a continuous run. And now i'm watching it with my kids, 3 and 10 years old, who love it as much as their dad.

The humor is very slapstick, and most of the fun is in anticipating the mayhem which is always a bit more over the top than you expect. Obviously the overall look of the earlier episodes is quite 'eastern Europe', and it's great this campy look has survived in the later series.

Truly a very good all out effort to incorporate the open-source (or better: open-movie) community with Hollywood CGI standards. Qualitywise characters, environments and storyline are comparable with the best short-movies Pixar has made. In that respect BBB is clearly targeted at a general audience with it's rather lightweight storyline, 'cudly' characters and somewhat crude humor. Realising that this free (!) cartoon is made by 7 people in 7 months and it's main purpose was to enrich the free CGI-software Blender with new technology (like 'fur'), the result is awesome. People and software who are capable of doing things like this, may well be rendering Pixar, Disney or Dreamworks obsolete in a few years.

@Bladerunner: don't hijack my remark for a private rant. Just read literally what I wrote. Pointer: notice the 'may' in the last sentence.

As said both execution as script are up there with Pixars shorts IMHO. Even regardless to quality: Blender Foundation clearly found a way to produce quality shorts in a very different way than the Pixars and Dreamworks produce theirs: with a coreteam of seven, their work supported by hundreds, maybe thousands of artists all over the world who make props, backgrounds etc. and submit them through the net. Bunny (and the new Sintel, which btw uses the voices of two of the biggest and mosty expensive Dutch international actors)) prove me right: you do not need big pockets, you need talent, creative commons license and the opensource community.

And that, my friend, may be a way to render the big studio's obsolete in a few years.