Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios, commonly referred to as Pixar (), is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California, that is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, owned by the Walt Disney Company. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder. Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion by converting each share of Pixar stock to 2.3 shares of Disney stock, a transaction that resulted in Jobs becoming Disney's largest single shareholder at the time. Pixar is best known for CGI-animated feature films created with RenderMan, Pixar's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface, used to generate high-quality images.
History of computer animation
In 1995, there came the first fully computer-animation feature film, Disney-Pixar's "Toy Story", which was a huge commercial success. This film was directed by John Lasseter, a co-founder of Pixar, and former Disney animator, who started at Pixar with short movies such as "Luxo Jr." (1986), "Red's Dream" (1987), and "Tin Toy" (1988), which was also the first computer-generated animated short film to win an Academy Award. Then, after some long negotiations between Disney and Pixar, a partnership deal was agreed in 1991 with the aim of producing a full feature movie, and "Toy Story" was the result.