
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, was launched in 1979 with the hiring of Catmull from NYIT, where he was in charge of the Computer Graphics Lab.

During the following months, they gradually resigned from CGL, found temporary jobs for about a year to avoid making Schure suspicious, and joined the Graphics Group at Lucasfilm. When Lucas approached them and offered them a job at his studio, six employees moved to Lucasfilm. Francis Ford Coppola then invited Smith to his house for a three-day media conference, where Coppola and George Lucas shared their visions for the future of digital moviemaking. Eventually, the group realized they needed to work in a real film studio in order to reach their goal. Schure kept pouring money into the computer graphics lab, an estimated $15 million, giving the group everything they desired and driving NYIT into serious financial troubles. Edwin Catmull and Malcolm Blanchard were the first to be hired and were soon joined by Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco some months later, which were the four original members of the Computer Graphics Lab, located in a converted two-story garage acquired from the former Vanderbilt-Whitney estate. Pixar got its start in 1974, when New York Institute of Technology's (NYIT) founder, Alexander Schure, who was also the owner of a traditional animation studio, established the Computer Graphics Lab (CGL) and recruited computer scientists who shared his ambitions about creating the world's first computer-animated film. The physical award was ceremoniously handed to Lucasfilm's founder, George Lucas.Ī Pixar computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View with the 1986–95 logo on it On February 10, 2009, Pixar executives John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich were presented with the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Film Festival. Up and Toy Story 3 were also nominated for the more competitive and inclusive Academy Award for Best Picture. Its films are frequently nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, since its inauguration in 2001, with eleven winners being Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), Brave (2012), Inside Out (2015), Coco (2017), Toy Story 4 (2019), and Soul (2020) the five nominated without winning are Monsters, Inc. Pixar has earned 23 Academy Awards, 10 Golden Globe Awards, and 11 Grammy Awards, along with numerous other awards and acknowledgments. Moreover, 15 of Pixar's films are in the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time.

Toy Story 3 (2010), Finding Dory (2016), Incredibles 2 (2018), and Toy Story 4 (2019) are all among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time, with Incredibles 2 being the fourth-highest-grossing animated film of all time, with a gross of $1.2 billion the other three also grossed over $1 billion. As of July 2019, its feature films have earned approximately $14 billion at the worldwide box office, with an average worldwide gross of $680 million per film. The studio has also produced many short films. Pixar has produced 26 feature films, starting with Toy Story (1995), which is the first fully computer-animated feature film its most recent film was Lightyear (2022). The studio's mascot is Luxo Jr., a desk lamp from the studio's 1986 short film of the same name. Pixar is best known for its feature films, technologically powered by RenderMan, the company's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan Interface Specification image-rendering API. Disney purchased Pixar in January 2006 at a valuation of $7.4+ billion by converting each share of Pixar stock to 2.3 shares of Disney stock. Pixar started in 1979 as part of the Lucasfilm computer division, known as the Graphics Group, before its spin-off as a corporation in 1986, with funding from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. Since 2006, Pixar has been a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, which owned by The Walt Disney Company. It is based in Emeryville, California, United States. Pixar Animation Studios ( / ˈ p ɪ k s ɑːr/) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films.
