Big Buck Bunny is the second short 3D computer animated cartoon from the Blender Foundation. The Blender Foundation produces these films to stimulate development of and promote use of their popular eponymous free software 3D modelling and rendering package.
The Foundation’s first film, codenamed Orange, was “Elephants Dream”. This was in the European experimental stop-frame animation tradition, a dark Gilliamesque fantasy with two men trying to escape a threatening clockwork labyrinth that may or may not really exist. The character and scenery designs were excellent, and the film as a whole was very atmospheric. The quality of the facial animation and the comprehensibility of the plot were criticised, though. And the full release of the soundtrack for the film was not Free due to being limited to noncommercial use. These minor criticisms aside, Elephants Dream was a very successful production.
Big Buck Bunny, by contrast, is firmly in the Dreamworks mould of cartoon animal comedies. This is quite a change from the steampunk magical realism of Elephants Dream. I am of course reviewing it for Furtherfield because it is an example of producing high-quality animation using an alternative funding model and giving the results to society in a copyable, study-able, reworkable, remixable form that advances participatory culture rather than because cartoon animals trying to kill each other is funny.
As the film begins we encounter the titular oversized rabbit living in a bucolic paradise of rolling fields, fruit trees, birds and butterflies. Destruction and cruelty intrude into this green and pleasant land in the form of a trio of vindictive smaller mammals. Big of heart as well as of frame the rabbit is quickly driven over the edge by the intruders’ spite and sets out to teach them a lesson in a superbly crafted series of cartoon violence vignettes.
The plot and characterisations suffer briefly from an unfocused start but quickly rally to an amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny climax. There are a couple of cuts that don’t quite scan, but you’ll miss them if you blink. The modelling, animation and rendering are superior to Dreamworks fare such as “Over The Hedge”. Big Buck Bunny‘s animators have a much better dramatic and artistic grasp of what made old Warner Brothers cartoons funny than Dreamworks seem to have, or at least they have not been prevented from using that knowledge. Visual comedy is about timing and the timing of Big Buck Bunny has the musical quality of the best old slapstick film and animation.
Despite being the products of very different genres and therefore difficult to compare objectively, the character animation of Big Buck Bunny is a definite advance on that of “Elephants Dream”. The sets and character designs are softer than those for Elephants Dream but this is a natural outcome of the genre and the characters are animated more fluidly and expressively. On a technical level this is due in no small part to the improvements that the Peach project requested from Blender’s modelling and rendering capabilities. On an artistic level, the small but tight-knit group of animators have clearly played to their strengths and interests on a project free of corporate organisational restraints. Both of these dynamics provide useful lessons for other projects.
The two-DVD set of the film includes the model, texture, animation and rendering files used to make the film as well as various quality renders and the PAL and NTSC versions of the finished film. The Free Culture licence for these materials makes them easy to watch, study, modify and use just about any way you can think of. If only Hollywood cartoons or Japanese anime came with such extras in a usable format.
Big Buck Bunny, like Elephant’s Dream, was paid for in part by DVD pre-orders and it is Free Culture licenced under Creative Commons’s Attribution licence (CC-BY). That the Blender Foundation are using this funding model again (essentially the “Street Performer Protocol”) presumably shows that it has worked well for them. They are even talking about making enough money this time to start funding the next project. The success of this approach should encourage people looking for ways to fund Free Culture projects.
You can download the files for free but buying the DVDs funds future projects and provides you with a handy physical archive. The CC-BY licence means that if you own a physical or electronic copy of Big Buck Bunny you effectively own the work, Copyright is unable to stop you from sharing and using it as you wish. Big Buck Bunny is therefore on the side of those who wish to keep mass culture free and open rather than locked away behind onerous contracts or technological protection measures.
The CC-BY licence does not, unlike the GPL licence for software, require that you provide the sources used to make the finished work. Big Buck Bunny shows how useful and empowering providing source material for cultural works is. The fact that you have the source material and production files for the film means that you possess the means to not just remix the finished work but to re-produce it and make derivatives of it at the same level of detail and quality as the original. You can produce works that are peers to it, creatively and economically.
The Blender Foundation are building the creative, technical and economic resources needed to create a very different relationship between producers and consumers of mass culture. Big Buck Bunny quickly finds its feet to provide excellent entertainment that rewards repeated viewing. Opening up the artistry of making the film as a usable resource is therefore a treat as well as a valuable contribution to free culture. Now if only the full soundtrack had been released under a free licence this time…
The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.
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