Toy Story Marks 30 Years of Cinematic History

|By J. Robert Parks|

Here are a couple of fun trivia questions to challenge your friends: What was the first full-length film that Pixar released, and what year was it released? The answer: Pixar’s first full-length movie, Toy Story, hit theaters 30 years ago. In the last three decades, Pixar has gone from being the upstart company challenging traditional methods of animation to becoming Disney’s in-house studio. Teachers and librarians who want to help students learn about computer animation, the history of cinema, or iconic movies in general will find a wealth of resources in Gale In Context: U.S. History.

The history of animation goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Émile Cohl’s 105-second movie, Fantasmagorie, was made in 1908 and is considered the first animated cartoon. The 12-minute animated film, Gertie the Dinosaur, made by Winsor McCay in 1914, was a huge influence on early animators like Max and Dave Fleischer, Paul Terry, and Walt Disney. Walt Disney Productions produced the first full-length animated movie in 1937—that could be another trivia question (it was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)—and the company dominated animated movies in the United States for the next six decades.

The genesis of computer animation can be traced to George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars. After he established Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) as the premier special-effects company in the 1970s, his enterprise started exploring how computer animation might work. In 1986, Steve Jobs, who had been fired from Apple the year before, decided to purchase the Graphics Group, the part of ILM then working on computer animation. Jobs invested millions of dollars into the company, now known as Pixar, with the hope of making a full-length movie created entirely by computer animation.

There was significant skepticism in the industry over that possibility coming to fruition anytime soon. In the late 1980s, personal computers were still relatively uncommon and few people knew what the internet was. The idea that a group of computing entrepreneurs could take on Disney seemed far-fetched. The success of Toy Story transformed Hollywood. Toy Story was the second-highest grossing movie of 1995 despite playing for only the last six weeks of the year. It quickly became apparent that computer animation marked an inflection point in movie history. DreamWorks, a new animation studio co-founded by Steven Spielberg, soon announced its first movie would be computer animated, and other studios followed.

None of those matched the success of Pixar, however. The studio released both commercial and critical hits. It helped that these films appealed to children, as well as their parents. While many animated movies, even Disney’s, were sometimes difficult for parents to sit through, Pixar’s were typically enjoyable for all generations. A cynic could note that Pixar routinely traded on the nostalgia parents have for childhood to provoke an emotional response. Other critics have written about the importance music played in most of the big Pixar films.

Within ten years of Toy Story’s release, Disney recognized that computer animation was the future and that Pixar did it better than anyone else. In 2006, Disney acquired the company for $7.4 billion and ceded significant control over the animation studio to Pixar. The last hand-drawn animated film Disney made was in 2011. Can you guess the title? (It was Winnie the Pooh.)