The Orange Movie project has just released their animated short, The Elephant's Dream. The project was sponsored by the Blender Foundation, an opensource community around the Blender 3D modeling, animation and rendering application. The Orange Movie Project's stated goals were to create an outstanding movie short, and to research efficient ways to increase quality of Open Source projects in general.

The short is nothing less than awesome. I've already downloaded it, you can get it and the project files that were used to make it on their web site. It makes me want to try my hand at 3d modeling and animation.

I had to download and install MPlayer to get it to play. MPlayer is currently a console application for Windows. However, there are frontends available for download. Here is one.