1979
Ed Catmull was hired by George Lucas to be the head of Lucas Films Computer Division. His group would be in charge of developing state of the art computer technology for the film industry. Lucas asked them to create him a digital film editing system and a digital film printer.
He also gave them the task of exploring further into computer graphics and its potential in the future. Catmull's team went on to invent such CG techniques as the alphas channel and particle effect.
1983
John Lasseter was invited by Lucas to join the graphics and asked to work on Thomas Porters 1984 pool ball image as well as the short film 'The Adventures of Andre and Wally B'.
He would go on to be hired full time the next year working as an interface designer.
1984
Pixar Premiered a partly completed version of 'The Adventures of Andre and Wally B' at SIGGRAPH.
This was the first short film ever created by the soon to be animation studio and included ground-breaking CG techniques such as detailed flexible character models, hand painted textures and advanced motion blur.
1986
Steve Jobs bought the CG division from George Lucas and christened it an independent company entitled 'Pixar'. at this time only about 44 members were employed. In the same year John Lasseter unveiled the short film Luxo Jr at SIGGRAPH, which would be his directional debut. It was later screened in LA theaters a few month later and was the first 3D CGI animated film to be nominated for an Oscar.
Luxo Jr would go on to be the character used in the Pixar logo animation that we know today.
1987-1989
Over the next three years pixar released three more short films called 'Red's Dream, Tin Toy and Knick Knack. These had new technologies like rain effects, lightning effects and the use of stereoscopic 3D. The earned a academy award and two clio awards for tin toy and some adverts.
The first commercials version of renderman was also released in 1989 when Pete Doctor and Andrew Stanton joined pixar.
1991
Pixar announced an agreement with Disney to make and distribute at least one computer generated animated movie.
1995
Pixar released Toy Story, the world's first feature length animated film. It became the highest grossing film of 1995, making $362 million worldwide.
Nominated for Best original song, Best original Score, and best original screenplay by the Academy of Motion Picture arts and Science.
1997
Pixar and Disney announced another agreement which entailed that they would jointly produce 5 more movies over the next 10 years. Pixar now had around 375 employees.
They then released the agreed 5 movies which included A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters inc, Finding nemo and the Incredibles. With the release of each film they contiously smashed box office records that they had already made and were nominated for multiples Oscars and Academy awards.
2006
Pixar celebrated its 20th anniversary and released Cars which received two Academy award nominations for best Animated Feature and Best original song. Disney also announved its agreement to purchase Pixar Studios. Ed Catmall was then named Chief Creative officer of Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.
Since then Disney and Pixar have worked together to create eight more feature length films including ratatouille, Wall-e, Up, Toy Story 3, Cars 2, brave, Monsters University and Planes, all of which have continuted to break box office records and bring home multiple awards.
14 feature length films
1200+ Employees
200+ awards
$8,820,219,390
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