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.
Pixar
During this period Pixar continued its successful relationship with Walt Disney Animation Studios, a studio whose corporate parent would ultimately become its most important partner. 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, essentially its original number. Yet Pixar made a historic $26 million deal with Disney to produce three computer-animated feature films, the first of which was "Toy Story". By then the software programmers, who were doing RenderMan and IceMan, and Lasseter's animation department, which made television commercials (and four Luxo Jr. shorts for "Sesame Street" the same year), were all that remained of Pixar.