Toy Story is a 1995 American animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. The first installment in the franchise of the same name, it was the first entirely computer-animated feature film, as well as the first feature film from Pixar.
Toy Story is also the first feature film of Pixar to be released in theaters, created by 27 animators in a team of 110 individuals working over 800,000 hours to render the finished movie, for its release in November of 1995.
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At 81 minutes, Toy Story presented unmatched challenges compared to the couple-minute runtimes of previous CGI fare.
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The film contains over 77 minutes of pure CGI with no live action. Generating this feature length film of polished imagery was a monumental feat.
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Toy Story also featured major advancements in character and environment modeling. Woody alone utilized 700 motion controls in his face, while cloth, wood, and metallic surfaces displayed unprecedented realism.
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Pixar designed their own $15 million RenderMan rendering software to handle the visual scale. Total rendering time topped out at 800,000 machine hours across a “render farm” of 117 Sun Microsystems computers.
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Toy Story proved CGI’s commercial viability. With a budget over $30 million, the future of computer animation hinged on financial success.
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The film grossed $373 million worldwide, signaling CG’s profit potential and paving the way for CGI dominance.
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