I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This still is the best blender animation studio open movie I've ever seen so far. I was hooked onto it right from the moment Sintel found the baby dragon, took care of it, till the tragic end. Even with blender's basic computer graphics, the story's still emotional enough to grasp anyone's attention.

This film was beautiful in almost every way. The animation, the music, and the story was well. This short film shows how powerful the Blender application is with hard work and determination. With more work, more workers, and more money, this could have been a feature-length production. I was pretty surprised that the actual making of the film (modeling, lighting, and animating) was done by not that large of a crew. That is because it isn't feature length, but th quality is on par with that of animations by Disney and pixar. This film should have won an Oscar for best animated short. I hope the Blender foundation continues to work on amazing films like these.

The film wasn't that bad, but could have easily been made into a longer film without missing out. It just felt like Finding Nemo without the middle bits.My main grievance, however, was the fact that it could have easily been a great mini film to show my kids. The fact that she killed the dragon would have had my daughter in floods of tears. And the baby dragon following her at the end was supposed to be the hope of a good ending? Didn't feel that way to me.Sorry. Great artistry and lovely action, but a waste of a good idea.My 2 cents.

This is a beautifully animated and skillfully executed tragic story. It hits all the key points of a classic tragedy in a way worthy of history's greatest playwrights. It has the "hero" who is good and decent but is brought down by her ambition and human frailty. It has the "reversal" when the fortune of finding her companion and overcoming the attacking dragon becomes the realization that the two are the same. This turns into the "recognition" that she has wasted her life on a quest with a flawed premise. At that moment, many things come together. She realizes how much time has passed. She finally understands the true relationship between Scales and herself. Scales moved on long ago, and what was left, what was driving her search, was her own obsession and delusion. She now sees herself for the battle-scarred killer she has become. Her quest has stolen her innocence and now, by her own hand, taken the life of the one she treasured most.The fact that the movie hits all these elements so potently in only 12 minutes is amazing. The more I watch it, the more I appreciate how well everything fits together. The foreshadowing, symbolism, and other elements throughout the movie give it a depth much greater than its length. Things that might not seem significant at first play important roles in the story. For example, Sintel appears to be an orphan, which could be seen as arbitrary back-story. However, this helps explain why she becomes so blinded to reality once Scales is taken. Scales is the only friend she has ever known, and the loss tears her apart.This powerful storytelling is then backed by animation that suits it wonderfully. There are imperfections, but the many things that are done incredibly well far outweigh any flaws. From the sense of wonder in racing up the temple, to the epic scale of Sintel's journey, to the expressions in Scales' face... it all works beautifully to magnify the story. The climax in particular pulls together story, visuals, sound and timing in a way that even the best feature films rarely achieve. I'm tempted to expound on every finely crafted detail, but it is best to just let you watch it and appreciate it yourself.To top everything off, this film is released freely under the Creative Commons license by the Blender Foundation, which also freely releases the open-source 3D modeling tool Blender used to make the movie. This means everything-- the movie, the models, the textures, the software-- EVERYTHING is freely available for anyone to use or change. That's a far cry from most movie releases that want it to be a crime to even rip your own DVD onto your computer/phone/etc.The Blender Foundation creates this and other short films to prove and improve the quality of their free 3D software, but they have done so much more here. This movie is a gift and a masterpiece.