In all seriousness, the past week was an awful, no good, very bad week for the Western indie and gaming industries (Technicolor shutting down and taking down once-great VFX studios like The Mill with it; Zaslav continuing his reign of terror on WB-Discovery by shutting down Monolith, hoarding the patent to their innovative "Nemesis" system, plus other gaming studios in favor of doubling down on Suicide-Squad-like live service flops; Companies like Disney and Nickelodeon stroking the Annoying Orange's ego by removing their diverse hiring initiatives, even as Trump loses court cases left and right and proves once again he is nowhere near competent enough to be an actual dictator; and of course, countless layoffs on any day ending in "y," even on otherwise-wildly-teams like the Marvel Rivals team in the US). Flow winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature over far more well-funded and mainstream movies like Inside Out 2, WIld Robot and Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl (not to say any of them are bad, you should watch all those + Memoir of a Snail in addition to Flow) was some much needed motivation after all the other, more negative events last week made me question whether I could ever still have a future in animation beyond spending way too long making too-short animations for the Movie Portal that only get 3.4 stars out of 5 at best.

The director, Gints Zilbalodis, is the same age as me, 30 years old on the dot, and, with the help of his friends, Blender, Blender's Eevee render engine, and later on French studios who clearly believed in his movie idea, proved once and for all you don't need to be part of a massive, greedy corporation or even rent overpriced "industry-standard" software like Maya, ZBrush, Adobe Creative Cloud and/or VRay in order to make a multi-award-winning CG masterpiece--you and your relatively-small team just needs to become damn good at fundamentals like emotional storytelling and effective use of animation principles. No AI required, either! No more lame excuses for me, just gotta work on my fundamentals, improve in Blender, and most importantly, improve in my cinematography and storytelling.

Special mention should go to another underdog win, Iran's "In the Shadow of the Cypress," managing to win in the Animated Shorts category, despite nobody even really knowing of this short's existence until yesterday, due to immigration troubles between war-torn Iran and anti-immigrant US meaning they could only get their visas and make it to the big show at the literal last minute, meaning they could not spend time and money throughout the Awards Season advertising their work. Yet apparently the once-seemingly-clueless Academy (at least in regards to animation as an art form) is so tired of automatically giving such awards to Disney, Pixar and Dreamwork's uncontroversial kiddie fare, they simply decided this troubled Iranian production told a short-form story more effectively than the rest of the competition. So between Latvia's first Oscar win with Flow and Iran's first win with In the Shadow of the Cypress--if you feel you may not amount to much as an animator due to living in a country without much of an animation industry, don't worry about it and push through the anxiety. This proves people (at least Americans) crave actual diverse storytelling from countries they may not have even heard of, and are not bound by or overly-familiar with tired storytelling tropes and cliches that have long defined either Hollywood animation or Japanese anime.

As Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities famously once said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Clearly the future of successful animation, the way I see it, is not sacrificing your social life and well-being for crotchety old corporations like Disney or Warner Bros only to fire you like the worthless cog in the machine they see you as when their latest remake only makes billions of dollars instead of bajillions of dollars--it's forming your own teams, using affordable software like Blender or Krita, and making stuff that audiences and, more importantly, YOU want to see in entertainment! Don't let this opportunity pass you by!