Blender is an Open Source tool to create animated movies. It runs on all common platforms and is aimed to bring the Hollywood animation techniques to home users and artists. To show off what the program can do, a small team was financed by sponsors and the Blender Institute in Amsterdam to create a short movie. After the Orange Project resulting in an Elephants Dream about 2 years ago, there is now the Peach Project. Its movie has been released under the name of Big Buck Bunny.

I absolutely recommend you to watch this movie. It's a short one, just about 10 minutes. It was created by a team of 7 people in about six months time. The short film features a big bunny which just loves nature and outdoors. But not bad little critters. As you may expect there are some hilarious twists and turns.

The graphics are great, and although perhaps not as good as Pixar can make 'em, they are visually quite stunning. The main task was to create something "funny and furry," putting Blender's fur physics and creation to the test.

During the making of the movie Blender was vastly improved to support techniques required by the Peach project.

I won't spoil the plot for you. All I can say is that the mission has succeeded and that Big Buck Bunny is definitely funny and furry. And free and open. You can check out various sizes of the film, from full HD to PSP or iPod, download or streaming. If your eyes are somewhat slow, you can check out every single frame as PNG file, all 14,315 of them. If you want to support Blender - remember, everything relies on donations and sponsors - you can also buy the (double) DVD with lots of extra goodies.

Check out BigBuckBunny.org for all the downloads, sources and the trailer above. Enjoy!