The first computer-animated feature
When TOY STORY opened in 1995 it was the first feature-length film made entirely with computer animation. Each frame could take hours to render, and the computers of the time struggled with things that look simple now: hair, water, and anything soft. That is partly why the first film was about plastic toys, which could be shiny and hard-edged without looking wrong.
Pixar had begun in the 1980s making short films to show off its software, the first starring a hopping desk lamp that became the company's logo. WOODY and BUZZ made its name, and Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for about 7.4 billion dollars.
The film that was nearly deleted
During work on Toy Story 2, someone ran a command on Pixar's computers that began deleting the film's files. By the time it was stopped, most of the work was gone, and the backups turned out to be broken. It was saved because the supervising technical director, Galyn Susman, had been working from home after having a baby and had a recent copy of the whole film on her computer. It was driven carefully to the studio, wrapped in blankets.
The film was then largely rewritten anyway, because the studio was unhappy with the story, and the finished version became one of Pixar's best loved.
Hidden in every film
Pixar animators leave the same jokes in almost every film. The code A113 — a classroom at the California Institute of the Arts, where many of them trained — appears on a car numberplate, a door or a camera. A yellow Pizza Planet delivery truck turns up somewhere in nearly every film, and a ball with a red star and a blue stripe appears in many.
BRAVE, released in 2012, was Pixar's first film with a girl as the main character and the first co-directed by a woman, Brenda Chapman. INSIDE OUT gives a girl's feelings their own characters, drawing on psychologists' research into basic emotions.
A real chef designed the rat's dish
For RATATOUILLE, animators spent time in real restaurant kitchens, and the American chef Thomas Keller advised on the food. The dish the rat Remy serves to the critic at the end is not the rough country stew most people make: Keller designed an elegant version with thin slices of vegetables arranged in overlapping rings, and the animators copied it.
A Pixar film usually takes four years or more to make, and each is shown in rough form to a group of the studio's directors many times over, with blunt notes on what is not working. Whole characters and plots are thrown out along the way, as happened with Toy Story 2.
A fish that should have changed
Finding NEMO has a secret that marine biologists enjoy pointing out. Real clownfish are all born male, and when the female of a pair dies, the male usually becomes female. By the rules of clownfish biology, Nemo's father would have changed after his mate was lost. Our sea animals page covers more of the ocean's odd biology.
The rest of the grid holds more Pixar films and characters: UP, COCO, CARS, SOUL, LUCA, ONWARD, RATATOUILLE, WALL-E, MONSTERS with SULLEY and MIKE, DORY, the INCREDIBLES, LIGHTYEAR, ELEMENTAL and TURNING RED.