Hacker Remix

The Free Movie: Frame-by-frame, handrawn reproduction of "The Bee Movie" (2023)

278 points by gaws 7 days ago | 70 comments

tristanj 7 days ago

Shrek Retold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM70TROZQsI is a similar fan-made reproduction, but it's way more polished. The movie is split into roughly 1min sections, with each one done by a different creator. The quality is all over the place, in a hilarious way. One minute it's produced by a professional animator nailing the scenes, then the next minute it's people goofing around in their backyard.

lloeki 7 days ago

I believe the trendsetter was Star Wars Uncut, made of 15s slices:

https://www.starwarsuncut.com/

Which I now realise I never watched in full...

cafeinux 7 days ago

I love the differences between those three movies (The Free Movie, Shrek Retold and Star Wars Uncut). Star Wars really looks like a work of love. Shrek looks like a work of love that tries it's best to not take itself seriously. Free Movie looks like a bizarre troll post.

While this is coherent with each movie's tone itself, and perhaps with the time each "demaster" was made (I don't know, I didn't check), I feel like this is most coherent with how each movie is viewed by the community:

- Star Wars is a beloved movie, with a huge honest fan base. Thus, it was remade with love and attention to detail.

- Shrek is a beloved movie, but doesn't take itself seriously in the first place, and is also a meme. Thus it was remade with love, but trying hard to look like it's a troll.

- Bee Movie is mainly a meme, isn't AFAIK a beloved movie, and its fan base is mostly made of memers and trolls. Thus it was low-effortly remade at this non-flattering image.

Freak_NL 6 days ago

> Bee Movie is mainly a meme, isn't AFAIK a beloved movie, […]

All you had to do was add one more 'e'. What a senseless waste of a pun…

johnnyanmac 7 days ago

Bee movie has more of a cult fanbase at best. It's still Seinfeld, and the jokes aged surprisingly well.

But there's only so far you can get with a story of a bee breaking out of his natural programming,followed by a bee-human romance, followed by said bee suing humanity for stealing bee-kind's honey. You can't even truly explain the plot without breaking it down into 3 episodes.

It's a surprisingly good benchmark to ask "is it better than Bee movie" when measuring other Dreamworks movies against themselves.

soperj 6 days ago

You forgot the part where the bees then sit around and do nothing after getting all their honey back. It's basically a diatribe against universal basic income, since without the incentive to slave away for the rest of their lives, their lives become meaningless.

cf100clunk 6 days ago

> Star Wars is a beloved movie, with a huge honest fan base. Thus, it was remade with love and attention to detail.

Agreed. Star Wars Uncut exists because devotees wanted to set the record straight regarding controversial changes in later versions, and their efforts were laudable. Still, the image and sound quality cannot match the latest, greatest studio versions, so watching Uncut versions on the newest home theatre gear means accepting the warts and all.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's remaster was also a labour of love but with a different purpose (image clarity and upscaling):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453745

dmonitor 6 days ago

I believe you are confusing Star Wars Uncut with Star Wars Despecialized Edition. Image and sound quality are far, far away from the first thing I would point out when distinguishing Uncut from the studio masters.

cf100clunk 5 days ago

Thank you, I did indeed mistake one for the other.

vhodges 6 days ago

There is an episode of Bob's Burgers that did something similar to this. https://bobs-burgers.fandom.com/wiki/Brunchsquatch/Trivia#:~...

bentcorner 6 days ago

Also there's the "The Princess Bride: Home Movie": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29s1yU3nGkQ

Note that this isn't really a fan-remake as it's professional actors but with the spliced scenes but it's pretty entertaining.

wk_end 7 days ago

There’s an extremely goofy version of RoboCop that’s sort of like this as well.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3528906/

plussed_reader 6 days ago

Our Robocop Remake is a scene by scene remake, made in the same spirit as this FreeBee Movie.

Worth a watch with friends present: https://vimeo.com/85903713

aceazzameen 6 days ago

The Robocop remake was my first thought. Some of those scenes are hilarious.

asabla 7 days ago

Some of the most goofiest scenes reminded me about my self growing up, recording dumb re-creations of movies/tv-shows with friends.

I had a blast watching that! thank you for sharing.

ikesau 6 days ago

I drew a few frames in this, but it was a real shame to see how little quality control there was in the final cut. Makes it kind of unwatchable.

Progress near the end was really fast, as lots of people had caught on and were racing to get as many frames in as possible.

I really don't think this concept has been worn out yet, and someone could make their own version of this with a small review step and then we'd get some fun, actually watchable hand-drawn movies :)

sjf 6 days ago

You’re right, I can’t believe they didn’t cut frames that are totally unrelated, there so many left in that are just scribbles or text.

I just tried making some frames for the dune remake. The editor is so hard to use. I can only draw a one pixel line with no smoothing. It’s really laggy/glitchy. I can barely even make out what the original frame is because it’s in grayscale with an overlay. I got one frame that could have been a landscape of snow and rocks, or it could have been sand dunes, or water. I have no idea, it was just gray and white blobs.

I get that they are going for a retro style, but even MS paint had different size brushes.

It’s such a cool idea, I wish the tooling was better.

ElCapitanMarkla 6 days ago

What would be interesting is if multiple submissions could be made for each frame, and you could rank each.

You could build a version of the best frames every year and watch it progress.

kevingadd 7 days ago

From a few moments of watching, it seems like over half the crowd-sourced frames are just trolling and not actually a representation of the original film. I guess that kind of adds to the aesthetic, but I'm a little surprised they kept those troll frames...

doubled112 7 days ago

For at least a few seconds it was an odd game of phallus or frame.

jsight 6 days ago

Yeah, there really needed to be some voting or other feedback system to encourage consistency over time.

This is a mildly interesting experiment that largely just looks like a failure at the moment.

lukevp 7 days ago

Yeah I agree, there should be a voting system that can kick out bogus frames and have someone remake them, would be really interesting to see what it’d look like if everyone was trying to recreate it. Kind of like rotoscoping I suppose. As it is, there’s just a ton of discontinuity because of the troll frames.

chem83 7 days ago

I imagine that trolls would eventually band together to try to steamroll the voting system like it happens on r/Place. Maybe.

nielsole 7 days ago

If votes are attributable, such voting rings should be easily detectable

pcblues 7 days ago

This is a fascinating idea. Sort of like a wikipedia, but trying to establish the truth of a single movie rather than everything we know.

It would probably end up needing moderators, harassing people for funding, and pay for political purposes as well as its core reason for existing :)

Reviving1514 7 days ago

This is amazing. I love that this exists. I'm surprised how negative some of the comments are.

SV_BubbleTime 7 days ago

I skipped to a random spot, and lasted about 5 seconds. Two drawings of dicks, 50% scribbles, and a couple frames of just the word PENIS. Yes, this is truly a noteworthy effort.

I’m as equally curious as you, just on the other side of the horseshoe.

polonbike 7 days ago

Same here. If you skip to a random part of the movie, and move frame by frame, it becomes a game of "spot the penis". Just one or two can be "tolerated", but we're far from that here, so ... My opinion is that it does not really belong in HN

andybak 6 days ago

> My opinion is that it does not really belong in HN

It's a fascinating tech/social experiment. It belongs on HN because it was done and the outcome is what it is.

If you actually want to watch the Bee Movie then watch the original. I doubt generating a watchable alternative was behind anyone's motivation in this.

filcuk 7 days ago

Because of a penis drawing? Are we in preschool? There have been those ever since caveman times.

robertlagrant 6 days ago

I think the point is we're not in preschool, nor are we cave(wo)men, so we don't need the penis drawings.

gopher_space 6 days ago

A penis drawing isn't something that's needed, it's something that happens. Feel free to rail against them in a Kanute-like manner, but learning to cock an eyebrow and say "yeah, that figures" can be self-preserving.

For what it's worth I too prefer the plausible deniability of Georgia O'Keefe's outrageous lies. It's a more sensible chuckle.

robertlagrant 6 days ago

No-one's railing against anything.

gopher_space 6 days ago

I was hoping to introduce my old “donging through the millennia” thesis work and ride that hobby horse around the room a little :(

shermantanktop 7 days ago

Did the caveman Bee Movie have penises in it? Because then you’d have a really good point.

aceazzameen 6 days ago

I'm sure this one had an absurdly short TTP (time to penis).

astura 6 days ago

>I'm surprised how negative some of the comments are.

It's literally unwatchable - It's 85% scribbles and "jokes."

tyleo 6 days ago

I can understand the negativity because this only appeals to specific sensibilities.

I admit that it’s low brow but it hits my fascination the exact right way. To me there is something special about so many people being organized around something so mundane.