Finally, branding of films made post-merger would be “Disney•Pixar” (beginning with Cars). Lasseter and Catmull’s oversight of both the Disney Feature Animation and Pixar studios did not mean that the two studios were merging, however. Pixar also wanted to finance its own films and collect 100% profit, paying Disney the 10%-15% distribution fee. Also for the first time, he took an active leadership role in the company and made himself CEO.

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Profits and production costs were split 50-50, but Disney exclusively owned all story and sequel rights and also collected a distribution fee. Pixar’s first five feature films have collectively grossed more than $2.5 billion, equivalent to the highest per-film average gross in the industry. As poor sales of Pixar’s computers threatened to put the company out of business, Lasseter’s animation department began producing computer-animated commercials for outside companies.

• Eventually, they decided they should be a hardware company in the meantime, with their Pixar Image Computer as the core product, a system primarily sold to governmental, scientific, and medical markets.
• Since the award’s inauguration in 2001, most of Pixar’s films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, with eleven winning; Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, Brave, Inside Out, Coco, Toy Story 4, and Soul.
• Over the next several years, the CGL would produce a few frames of an experimental film called The Works.
• In a bid to drive sales of the system and increase the company’s capital, Jobs suggested releasing the product to the mainstream market.

COVID-19, Disney+ releases, and some financial struggles (2020–present)

After moving to Lucasfilm, the team worked on creating the precursor to RenderMan, called REYES (for “renders everything you ever saw”) and developed a number of critical technologies for CG—including “particle effects” and various animation tools. Since the award’s inauguration in 2001, most of Pixar’s films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, with eleven winning; Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, Brave, Inside Out, Coco, Toy Story 4, and Soul. The former, which, although was a financial success, received substantially less praise than Pixar’s previous films, while the latter, although met with favorable reviews, was a considered a box office flop (mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020). Eighteen of the films has received both critical and financial success, with the notable exceptions being Cars 2, The Good Dinosaur, Onward, and Lightyear. The first 3D project accepted to the program was Borrowed Time (2016); all previously accepted films were live-action.

As 1991 began, however, the layoff of 30 employees in the company’s computer hardware department (including the company’s president, Chuck Kolstad), reduced the total number of employees to just 42, approximately its original number. During this period of time, Pixar continued its successful relationship with Walt Disney Feature Animation, a studio whose corporate parent would ultimately become its most important partner. Pixar released some of its software tools on the open market for Macintosh and Windows systems. In 1989, Lasseter’s growing animation department which was originally composed of just four people (Lasseter, Bill Reeves, vegas casino download Eben Ostby, and Sam Leffler), was turned into a division that produced computer-animated commercials for outside companies. At the time, Walt Disney Studios made the decision to develop more efficient ways of producing animation. As a result, they focused on the computer hardware business for years until a computer-animated feature became feasible according to Moore’s law.

The project continued sometime after they became a separate company in 1986, but it became clear that the technology was not sufficiently advanced. Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs’s first jobs was under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to focus on PTT. Eventually, they decided they should be a hardware company in the meantime, with their Pixar Image Computer as the core product, a system primarily sold to governmental, scientific, and medical markets. Worried that the employees would be lost to them if that happened, which would prevent the creation of the first computer-animated movie, they concluded that the best way to keep the team together was to turn the group into an independent company.

In April 2012, Pixar announced their intention to create a film centered on the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos and to be directed by Lee Unkrich, under the new name Coco. After Toy Story 4, Pixar chief Pete Docter said that the studio would take a break from sequels and focus on original projects. In 2014, Brad Bird claimed to have begun pre-production on a sequel to The Incredibles, with it being eventually revealed as Incredibles 2. Monsters University, the prequel to Monsters, Inc. and Pixar’s first prequel, was announced on April 22, 2010, for release on November 2, 2012. Cars 2, Pixar’s first sequel not based on Toy Story, was officially announced on April 8, 2008.

• It had the highest second weekend gross for an animated film with $100 million, being the first to reach the six-digit second opening weekend.
• In May 2006, it was announced that Toy Story 3 was back in pre-production with a new plot and under Pixar’s control.
• Even today, after the many missteps they’ve experienced throughout the 2020s, many would still call Pixar the world’s best producer of animated films.
• Pixar’s first movie to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar remains both exciting and touching throughout, aided by some of the studio’s most compelling characters and one of their most memorable scores (composed by Michael Giacchino).
• Monsters University, the prequel to Monsters, Inc. and Pixar’s first prequel, was announced on April 22, 2010, for release on November 2, 2012.

Despite the total income of these products, the company was still losing money, and Jobs often considered selling it. At that point, the software programmers, who were doing RenderMan and CAPS, and Lasseter’s animation department, who made television commercials and a few shorts for Sesame Street, was all that was left of Pixar. During this period, Pixar continued its relationship with Walt Disney Feature Animation, a studio whose corporate parent would ultimately become its most important partner. One of the buyers of Pixar Image Computers was Disney Studios, which was using the device as part of their secretive CAPS project, using the machine and custom software to migrate the laborious ink and paint part of the 2-D animation process to a more automated and thus efficient method. Initially, Pixar was a high-end computer hardware company whose core product was the Pixar Image Computer, a system primarily sold to government agencies and the medical community. The newly independent company was headed by Jobs, who served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Pixar.

Filmography

Since December 2005, Pixar has held exhibitions celebrating the art and artists of Pixar, over their first twenty years in animation. Up until his death in late 2011, Jobs continued in his role as chairman and was also the company’s CEO. In May 2011, Pixar CCO John Lasseter implied that Newt had been shelved due to it having a similar plot-line to Blue Sky Studios’ film Rio (which is now under the Disney umbrella).

Pixar

The rule ensures that each studio maintains “local ownership” of projects and can be proud of its own work. In this new position, Morris took charge of the day-to-day running of the studio facilities and products. Also, the Pixar name was guaranteed to continue, and the studio would remain in its current Emeryville, California, location with the “Pixar” sign.

Originally intended as a straight-to-video release (and thus could’ve been part of Pixar’s three-picture deal), the film was eventually upgraded to a theatrical release during production. Pixar has produced twenty-nine feature films, beginning with Toy Story in 1995, which is best known for being the first full-length feature film made in CGI animation format ever. It is best known for its revolutionary CGI-animated feature films created with PhotoRealistic RenderMan, its own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface used to generate high-quality images. While the short films Your Friend the Rat (2007), Day & Night (2010), Kitbull (2019), Burrow (2020), and Twenty Something (2021) feature 2D animation.

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Pixar’s first-ever nominee for the first-ever Best Animated Feature Oscar (which it lost against DreamWorks’ Shrek), Monsters, Inc. is still one of the studio’s best. It’s a perfectly full-circle Hero’s Journey moment, showing how Marlin has become less anxious, and Nemo has become more responsible since the beginning of the story. Whatever it is that makes these ten conclusions special, they’re all proof that no studio does unforgettable endings quite like Pixar. Not only Pixar, but the Sony movie, “Sausage Party”, which is essentially a parody of Pixar movies, was also inspired by this question as Seth Rogen (who played Frank in the film) had asked it. The first Toy Story is the only film not to have a reference to an upcoming film. He has become such a stable part of the company that he plays on its softball team.

Pixar’s creative heads were consulted to fine tune the script for the 2011 live-action film The Muppets. Jim Morris, president of Pixar, produced Disney’s John Carter (2012) which Andrew Stanton co-wrote and directed. 1906, the live-action film by Brad Bird based on a screenplay and novel by James Dalessandro about the 1906 earthquake, was in development but has since been abandoned by Bird and Pixar. A TV series based on Inside Out was announced to be in development for Disney+ in June 2023, with Soul co-writer Mike Jones hired as developer. Toy Story is the first Pixar film to be adapted for television as a Buzz Lightyear of Star Command film and TV series on the UPN television network, now The CW. In August 2024, during the D23 Expo, Docter announced that Incredibles 3 is in development, with Brad Bird returning to develop.

Elio is now available to watch on Disney+!

Whether Toy Story 4 did or did not feel like a natural progression of this story and its characters is beside the point; Toy Story 3’s ending is a masterpiece, easily the best in Pixar’s lineup. Largely, it’s this conclusion that makes this one of the best animated movies of the last 25 years, bringing these characters to an ending that feels as bittersweet as it does poignantly satisfying. Released eleven years after its predecessor, this follow-up took the world by surprise by proving the heights that a purposeful, well-made legacy sequel can reach. There’s no big twist, no predictable emotional beat; just a perfect way to bring the story’s themes and characters to their natural conclusion. Ratatouille has one of the studio’s most powerful, nuanced, and layered endings.

For those who had traditional animation skills, the Pixar animation software (Marionette) is designed so that traditional animators would require a minimum amount of training before becoming productive. The majority of the animation industry was and is still located in Los Angeles, California, while Pixar is located 350 miles north in the San Francisco Bay Area. While some of Pixar’s first animators were former cel animators, including John Lasseter, they also came from stop motion animation and/or computer animation or were fresh college graduates. On April 20, 2010, Pixar Animation Studios opened a new studio in the downtown area of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In this new position, Morris is in charge of the day-to-day running of the studio facilities and products. Also, the Pixar name was guaranteed to continue, and the studio would remain in its current Emeryville, California location with the “Pixar” sign.

According to The Hollywood Reporter and The Washington Post, Lasseter had a history of alleged sexual misconduct towards employees. On November 21, 2017, Lasseter announced that he was taking a six-month leave of absence after acknowledging what he called “missteps” in his behavior with employees in a memo to staff. Both continued to report to Catmull, who retained the title of president of both Disney Animation and Pixar. In October 2013, the studio was closed down to refocus Pixar’s efforts at its main headquarters. Thus for example, when Pixar had issues with Ratatouille and Disney Animation had issues with Bolt (2008), “nobody bailed them out” and each studio was required “to solve the problem on its own” despite knowing that there were personnel at the other studio who theoretically could have helped.

Some of these films include Ratatouille (2007), Toy Story 3 (2010), Toy Story 4 (2019), Incredibles 2 (2018), Inside Out (2015), Inside Out 2 (2024), The Good Dinosaur (2015), Onward and Soul, Turning Red, Lightyear (both 2022), and Elemental (2023). Additionally, Pixar is known for their films having expensive budgets, ranging from $150–200 million. Pixar paid tribute to Ratzenberger in the end credits of Cars (2006) by parodying scenes from three of its earlier films (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and A Bug’s Life), replacing all of the characters with motor vehicle versions of them and giving each film an automotive-based title. Actor John Ratzenberger, who had previously starred in the television series Cheers (1982–1993), has voiced a character in every Pixar feature film from Toy Story through Onward (2020). A large number of animators that make up its animation department had been hired around the releases of A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001), and Finding Nemo (2003). The first of several buildings, the high-tech structure designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson has special foundations and electricity generators to ensure continued film production, even through major earthquakes.

Cars became the second with the help of Cars Toons, a series of 3-to-5-minute short films running between regular Disney Channel show intervals and featuring Mater from Cars. In February 2023, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that Toy Story 5 was in development, aiming for a 2026 release. However, in a later interview, Docter said the studio would have to return to making sequels at some point for its “financial safety”.