Pixar, which has brought us films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and so many other gems that have become part of the childhoods of several generations, is one of the world’s best-known and most important animation studios. But its beginnings were very different from what most of us might imagine.
Pixar’s beginnings
In February 1986, Steve Jobs purchased Lucasfilm’s computer division and turned it into an independent company with around forty employees.
At the time, Pixar was merely a small, experimental company that was difficult to define. It manufactured specialized computers, developed graphics software, and produced short films to demonstrate what its technology could achieve.
Three years later, however, news arrived that Jobs interpreted as something far greater than a simple award.
The email in which steve jobs celebrated Pixar’s Oscar
On March 29, 1989, Tin Toy won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. Directed by John Lasseter, the film told the story of Tinny, a small musical toy who tries to escape from a baby and eventually discovers that, despite the danger, he still wants the child to play with him.
It lasted only a few minutes, but it achieved something unprecedented: it became the first computer-generated film to receive an Academy Award. It was also competing against works made using traditional animation, at a time when digital graphics were still seen mainly as a technical tool.
After hearing the news, Jobs wrote an email to the employees of NeXT the following day. The message had the subject line “A great day and a half” and congratulated the team on an achievement of NeXT’s own, before immediately adding that Pixar had also accomplished something remarkable.
His enthusiasm centred on one idea: the computer graphics industry had just reached a milestone, and Pixar had led the way. Steve Jobs’s original email can be read in the Steve Jobs Archive, in Make Something Wonderful, under the title “Pixar led the way!”. It is a brief message, but it reveals the importance Jobs placed on the award from the very beginning.
Pixar was not always a film studio
However, despite holding that small statuette in its hands, Tin Toy did not immediately turn Pixar into the company we know today. Following that success, the studio began producing advertisements for brands such as Tropicana and also released the first commercial version of RenderMan. Its short films demonstrated the artistic potential of digital animation, but the company still needed to find a sustainable business model.
It was not until two years later that Pixar signed an agreement with Disney to produce the film that would eventually become Toy Story. Its main character would also be a toy, and its story would grow out of the idea that had begun with Tin Toy.
That Oscar showed Steve Jobs and the world that Pixar’s technology could be used to tell stories and move audiences. And what was celebrated that day was not merely a short film: a new way of making cinema had been discovered.
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