After one of the most exciting Pixar climaxes ever, the film’s third act concludes with a tranquil day in the Parrs’ family, everyone watching Dash run a race. Seeing as it’s largely a tribute to old Hollywood rom-coms, which of course includes many silent movies, it’s quite fitting that a big portion of WALL•E’s runtime is mostly devoid of dialogue. In one of the studio’s most emotional reveals, Mike shows Sulley that he’s been rebuilding Boo’s door, and with Sulley opening the door and being greeted by Boo’s “Kitty!” offscreen, we fade to black. Mike becomes the company’s top comedian, and Sulley becomes the new CEO. Some time after Boo is sent home and her door is destroyed, Monsters, Inc. begins to collect energy by making children laugh instead of scream.
Cars became the second with the help of Cars Toons, a series of 3-to-5-minute short films running between regular Disney Channel show intervals and featuring Mater from Cars. In February 2023, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that Toy Story 5 was in development, aiming for a 2026 release. However, in a later interview, Docter said the studio would have to return to making sequels at some point for its “financial safety”.
But Moore’s Law also suggested that sufficient computing power for the first film was still some years away, and they needed to focus on a proper product until then. With Lucas’s 1983 divorce, which coincided with the sudden dropoff in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi, they knew he would most likely sell the whole Graphics Group. In 1982, the Pixar team began working on special-effects film sequences with Industrial Light & Magic. Over the next several years, the CGL would produce a few frames of an experimental film called The Works. He was then reunited with Smith, who also made the journey from NYIT to Lucasfilm, and was made the director of the Graphics Group. The Graphics Group, which was one-third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm, opened in 1979 with the hiring of Catmull from NYIT, where he was in charge of the Computer Graphics Lab.
Elio is now available to watch on Disney+!
He writes a glowing review nonetheless, and some time later, he becomes a frequent guest of a new bistro opened by Remy, Linguini, and Colette. Memories and love make it so that death is never truly the end, and no Pixar film shows that better than Coco. At once a beautiful tribute to Mexican culture and a hugely entertaining story in itself, Coco is visually delightful and full of excellent music. Pixar’s first movie to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar remains both exciting and touching throughout, aided by some of the studio’s most compelling characters and one of their most memorable scores (composed by Michael Giacchino). This cliffhanger famously took a whopping 14 years to materialize into a (rather underwhelming) sequel, but even in a vacuum, it’s one of Pixar’s most exciting and satisfying conclusions.
Newt was also removed from the official Disney A to Z Encyclopedia supplement by chief archivist Dave Smith, who confirmed that the film had been canceled. This project was to be followed by the fantasy film The Bear and the Bow. 1906, a planned live-action film by Brad Bird about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was once reported to be in development. The first batch was known as Mater’s Tall Tales (3 to 5 minutes), where Mater (voiced by comedian Larry the Cable Guy) tells Lightning McQueen (voiced by Keith Ferguson) a story about something he did in the past that is eventually revealed to be real.
A Century of Cinema — The 20 Greatest Movies of the Last 100 Years, Ranked
John Ratzenberger, most widely known as the postman Cliff Clavin from the television sitcom Cheers, is always a character voice, referred to by the studio as their “good luck charm”. The setting of the film is always a world in which people/creatures/objects that are not commonly thought to have normal everyday lives live in societies resembling modern American society. Another highlight is the Zoetrope, where visitors of the exhibition are shown figurines of Toy Story characters “animated” in real-life through the zoetrope. The exhibition highlights consist of work-in-progress sketches from various Pixar productions, clay sculptures of their characters, and an auto-stereoscopic short showcasing a 3D version of the exhibition pieces which is projected through 4 projectors.
- Similar to George Lucas’ 1138, the letter-number sequence A113 is an animation in-joke that appears in all Pixar films to date, except Monsters, Inc.
- Toy Story 3 (2010), Finding Dory (2016), Incredibles 2 (2018), Toy Story 4 (2019) and Inside Out 2 (2024) all grossed over $1 billion and are among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time.
- The project continued sometime after they became a separate company in 1986, but it became clear that the technology was not sufficiently advanced.
- Toy Story 3 was the second big-screen sequel and was released on June 18, 2010.
- Additionally, many Pixar animators, both former and current, were recruited for a traditional hand-drawn animated sequence for the 2018 film Mary Poppins Returns.
As of August 2025update, Inside Out 2 was the second highest-grossing animated film of all time. Toy Story 3 (2010), Finding Dory (2016), Incredibles 2 (2018), Toy Story 4 (2019) and Inside Out 2 (2024) all grossed over $1 billion and are among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time. As of July 2023update, its feature films have earned over $15 billion at the worldwide box office with an average gross of $589 million per film. Pixar is best known for its feature films, technologically powered by its RenderMan software. Praised by some as Pixar’s single greatest film, Ratatouille takes the concept of a cooking rat and turns it into a beautiful story about passion, talent, and how everyone is worthy of doing what they love.
Partnership with Disney
In a 2023 interview, Pixar’s president Jim Morris stated that one of the reasons why their films have expensive budgets is because they are produced entirely in the U.S. with all of the artists under one roof, while almost all of their competitors keep costs down by doing work offshore. With the scarcity of Los Angeles-based animators willing to move their families so far north to give up traditional animation and try computer animation, Pixar’s new hires at this time either came directly from college or had worked outside feature animation. Dream Productions, an Inside Out spin off series set between the first and second film, was released on December 11, 2024 on Disney+. Inside Out 2 became the highest-grossing animated film, and the 8th-highest grossing film of all time at the end of its theatrical run.
On the basis of one of the most creative premises in Pixar’s history, Inside Out tells one of the studio’s most emotional stories. Part exciting family film, part spy thriller, and part dissection of the meaning of middle-class suburban family life in post-9/11 America, The Incredibles is, needless to say, one of the studio’s most mature and complex efforts. Before superhero films became all the rage in Hollywood with the advent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pixar dipped its toes into the genre, and it just so happens that The Incredibles is far and away one of the genre’s best outings. Since 1995, Pixar Animation Studios has established itself as the ruling animation studio not just in North America, but arguably worldwide. The central theme of Pixar is the true meaning of friendship, where a majority of films have dynamic duos or groups.
Expansion and John Lasseter’s exit (2010–
- Originally intended as a direct-to-video release (and thus not part of Pixar’s three-picture deal), the film was eventually upgraded to a theatrical release during production.
- The success of Toy Story (1995) made Pixar the first major computer-animation studio to successfully produce theatrical feature films.
- The Pixar Co-op Program, a part of the Pixar University professional development program, allows their animators to use Pixar resources to produce independent films.
- 1906, the live-action film by Brad Bird based on a screenplay and novel by James Dalessandro about the 1906 earthquake, was in development but has since been abandoned by Bird and Pixar.
- Shortly after announcing the resurrection of Toy Story 3, Lasseter stated, “If we have a great story, we’ll do a sequel.” Cars 2, Pixar’s first non-Toy Story sequel, was officially announced in April 2008 and released on June 24, 2011, as their twelfth.
On July 3, 2016, Pixar president Jim Morris announced that the studio might be moving away from sequels after Toy Story 4. The film was released on June 18, 2010, as Pixar’s eleventh feature film.citation needed After the two companies were unable to agree on a new deal, Disney announced in 2004 they would plan to move forward on sequels with or without Pixar and put Toy Story 3 into pre-production at Disney’s then-new CGI division Circle Seven Animation. The layoffs occurred as the studio began to rely less on direct-to-streaming series and more on feature films intended primarily for theatrical exhibition.
Some of Pixar’s first animators were former cel animators including John Lasseter, and others came from computer animation or were fresh college graduates. The digital revolution in filmmaking was driven by applied mathematics, including computational physics and geometry. It became the fastest animated movie to reach $1 billion at the global box office, reaching the milestone in 17 days. However, the layoffs were then delayed and did not occur, reportedly because of production schedules. In January 2024, it was reported that Pixar’s staff would face imminent layoffs by 20 percent, reducing the studio’s workforce to less than 1,000 employees.
History of Pixar
Though similar scenes and situations may appear, these sequences are not in the films being advertised, but instead are original creations. Some of these boxes made appearances in several Pixar films (in A Bug’s Life for example, the box was used as “The Chinese Cabinet of Metamorphosis”). Although it hasn’t been as consistent as some of their other Easter eggs, in recent years it has become a tradition for Pixar to put in each of their films a cameo of or an allusion to a character from their following film. Joe Ranft holds the second-long Pixar vocal performance tenure, but the person who has appeared in the second most Pixar films is Bonnie Hunt. The Science Behind Pixar is a traveling exhibition, developed by the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts in collaboration with Pixar, that teaches about the production pipeline at Pixar in the form of the filmmaking process. Lasseter —a two-time Academy Award-winning director and animator— oversaw all the company’s projects as Executive Vice President of the Creative Department until vegas casino download 2018, when he left Pixar and Pete Docter became the new Executive Vice President of the Creative Department.
On June 15, 2018, Incredibles 2 was released, setting a record for widest opening weekend worldwide and domestic for an animated film. Pending the Disney acquisition of Pixar, the two companies created a distribution deal for the intended 2007 release of Ratatouille, to ensure that if the acquisition failed, this one film would be released through Disney’s distribution channels. The proposed distribution deal meant Pixar would control production and own the resulting story, character, and sequel rights, while Disney would own the right of first refusal to distribute any sequels. Originally intended as a direct-to-video release (and thus not part of Pixar’s three-picture deal), the film was eventually upgraded to a theatrical release during production. Moreover, 13 of Pixar’s films are in the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time.
Collaboration with Disney (1999–
Pixar’s first-ever nominee for the first-ever Best Animated Feature Oscar (which it lost against DreamWorks’ Shrek), Monsters, Inc. is still one of the studio’s best. It’s a perfectly full-circle Hero’s Journey moment, showing how Marlin has become less anxious, and Nemo has become more responsible since the beginning of the story. Whatever it is that makes these ten conclusions special, they’re all proof that no studio does unforgettable endings quite like Pixar. Not only Pixar, but the Sony movie, “Sausage Party”, which is essentially a parody of Pixar movies, was also inspired by this question as Seth Rogen (who played Frank in the film) had asked it. The first Toy Story is the only film not to have a reference to an upcoming film. He has become such a stable part of the company that he plays on its softball team.
Since December 2005, Pixar has held exhibitions celebrating the art and artists of Pixar, over their first twenty years in animation. Up until his death in late 2011, Jobs continued in his role as chairman and was also the company’s CEO. In May 2011, Pixar CCO John Lasseter implied that Newt had been shelved due to it having a similar plot-line to Blue Sky Studios’ film Rio (which is now under the Disney umbrella).
The film became a box-office failure with Deadline Hollywood calculating the film lost the studio $106 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues. On June 21, 2019, Toy Story 4 was released, surpassing the widest opening worldwide weekend record that Incredibles 2 set. On January 18, 2019, it was announced that Lee Unkrich would be leaving Pixar after 25 years although he would return to the studio a few years later. In November 2014, Morris was promoted to president of Pixar, while his counterpart at Disney Animation, general manager Andrew Millstein, was also promoted to president of that studio.
References to upcoming films
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, approximately its original number. During this period of time, Pixar continued its successful relationship with Walt Disney Feature Animation, a studio whose corporate parent would ultimately become its most important partner. Pixar released some of its software tools on the open market for Macintosh and Windows systems. In 1989, Lasseter’s growing animation department which was originally composed of just four people (Lasseter, Bill Reeves, Eben Ostby, and Sam Leffler), was turned into a division that produced computer-animated commercials for outside companies. At the time, Walt Disney Studios made the decision to develop more efficient ways of producing animation. As a result, they focused on the computer hardware business for years until a computer-animated feature became feasible according to Moore’s law.
The Pixar Co-op Program, a part of the Pixar University professional development program, allows their animators to use Pixar resources to produce independent films. Pixar representatives have also assisted in the English localization of several Studio Ghibli films, mainly those from Hayao Miyazaki. Additionally, many Pixar animators, both former and current, were recruited for a traditional hand-drawn animated sequence for the 2018 film Mary Poppins Returns. Similarly, Pixar assisted in the story development of Disney’s The Jungle Book (2016) as well as providing suggestions for the film’s end credits sequence. In June 2018, Bird mentioned the possibility of adapting the novel as a TV series, and the earthquake sequence as a live-action feature film. Between 2013 and 2014, Pixar released its first two television specials, Toy Story of Terror!
Pixar’s creative heads were consulted to fine tune the script for the 2011 live-action film The Muppets. Jim Morris, president of Pixar, produced Disney’s John Carter (2012) which Andrew Stanton co-wrote and directed. 1906, the live-action film by Brad Bird based on a screenplay and novel by James Dalessandro about the 1906 earthquake, was in development but has since been abandoned by Bird and Pixar. A TV series based on Inside Out was announced to be in development for Disney+ in June 2023, with Soul co-writer Mike Jones hired as developer. Toy Story is the first Pixar film to be adapted for television as a Buzz Lightyear of Star Command film and TV series on the UPN television network, now The CW. In August 2024, during the D23 Expo, Docter announced that Incredibles 3 is in development, with Brad Bird returning to develop.
In 2021, several Pixar employees anonymously criticized Disney’s decision to release their films direct to Disney+. Pixar’s next two features, Luca and Turning Red, were also released free on Disney+ in June 2021 and March 2022, respectively. However, due to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film underperformed at the box office and was released onto rental digital services on March 20, and later on Disney+ on April 3. During the 2019 D23 Expo, Pixar announced that their next film, Soul, would release in 2020.
This would also allow Pixar to release DVDs for their major releases during the Christmas shopping season. Pixar demanded that the film then is counted toward the three-picture agreement, but Disney refused. Later that year, Pixar held its initial public offering on November 29, 1995, and the company’s stock was priced at US$22 per share.
