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.
Disney's Animated Storybook
The Interactive Products Group (also known as the Pixar Interactive Division), a Pixar subsidiary, was founded in 1996. Its staff included 95 of Pixar's 300 and was headed by Vice President Interactive Products Pam Kerwin. It was founded to create computer games and it had its own animators, art department, and engineers. They were tasked with creating two products amid intense time constraints: "Toy Story Animated Storybook:" (released April 1996) and "Toy Story Activity Center" (released October 1996), to coincide with the VHS release of the "Toy Story" film. As vice president of the Interactive Products Group from 1996 to 1998, Pam Kerwin spearheaded development of interactive edutainment products based on Pixar's feature film properties. She adapted the feature production process to the production of interactive products. The division produced the two products within 16 months. "Disney's Animated Storybook: Toy Story" was touted as "the first CD-ROM to deliver full screen, motion-picture-quality animation on home computers". Between the two products, the group had created as much original animation as there was in the "Toy Story" film itself.