The Free Movie: Frame-by-frame, handrawn reproduction of "The Bee Movie" (2023)
74 comments
·January 13, 2025tristanj
lloeki
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
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
> 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
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.
cf100clunk
> 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):
vhodges
There is an episode of Bob's Burgers that did something similar to this. https://bobs-burgers.fandom.com/wiki/Brunchsquatch/Trivia#:~...
bentcorner
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
There’s an extremely goofy version of RoboCop that’s sort of like this as well.
plussed_reader
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
The Robocop remake was my first thought. Some of those scenes are hilarious.
asabla
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.
tzs
Similar is "South Park Reanimated: The List" [1]. From the description:
> 6 years, 175 animators, 260 unique scenes, 1 copyright dispute, and a lot of love-- we are proud to finally present the South Park Reanimated Project! We are so grateful for everyone who participated and made this such an amazing recreation. We hope you enjoy!
doublerabbit
Incredible. A great episode too.
sirbranedamuj
also featuring a great reimagining of I'm A Believer by Hot Dad :)
ikesau
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
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
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
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
For at least a few seconds it was an odd game of phallus or frame.
null
jsight
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
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
I imagine that trolls would eventually band together to try to steamroll the voting system like it happens on r/Place. Maybe.
nielsole
If votes are attributable, such voting rings should be easily detectable
pcblues
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
This is amazing. I love that this exists. I'm surprised how negative some of the comments are.
SV_BubbleTime
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
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
> 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
Because of a penis drawing? Are we in preschool? There have been those ever since caveman times.
aceazzameen
I'm sure this one had an absurdly short TTP (time to penis).
astura
>I'm surprised how negative some of the comments are.
It's literally unwatchable - It's 85% scribbles and "jokes."
tyleo
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.
eigenblake
We could probably fine-tune a tiny convolutional neutral net image classifier and just hold on the last good frames for longer to cover the frames with clear trolling and nsfw images.
BriggyDwiggs42
I think that would miss the point
mkagenius
No, that point was already made. This will be a new point unlike the previous point.
BriggyDwiggs42
But i like the previous point. Why would you take it from me?
binary_slinger
Who is going to put each frame into image to image AI model and get out a photorealistic output and recompile?
cafeinux
Lots of photorealistic phalluses are going to be generated.
davidmurdoch
Only if you're using a model trained on them
RankingMember
I think it would be against the spirit of the project not to do so
Terretta
I've read white papers seemingly claiming with the right prompt these sketches would turn into the indicated art.
That would be quite the compression scheme.
_bent
[flagged]
dang
Related:
The Free Movie - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36687399 - July 2023 (100 comments)
echelon
Back when I was first playing around with AI, I built a website where people could upload fine tuned GlowTTS and Tacotron2 text to speech model weights.
One of the first things users did was to emit the entire transcript of the Bee Movie:
airstrike
I think the word "crowdsourced" is conspicuously missing from the title. It would explain a lot.
cafeinux
They do say it's "crowd-pirated".
yboris
Different approach: splice in visual and audio effects of guns into Harry Potter
Harry Potter and the Deathly Weapons -- Harry Potter With Guns
conductr
I never watched or read the series but my wife was watching it (last week actually), I passed by and saw a chase scene where they were shooting from their wands at each other and I made a comment like "Oh, it's Jason Bourne for kids.. now I see the appeal"
r-w
Epilepsy warning please! :-)
bytematic
would be cool without all the trolling
smolder
Better in concept than execution, for sure. I feel bad for the people that actually drew their frames competently.
ternnoburn
The execution is part of the art of it, like, there's a statement being made about the Internet, anonymity, and humanity here. It may not be what the artist originally set out to create with their art, which I find fascinating.
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.