7-1 Disney•Pixar Shorts

Disney•Pixar

How did they start?

Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio

Kansas City, Missouri natives Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923 and got their start producing a series of silent Alice Comedies short films featuring a live-action child actress in an animated world. Upon relocating to California, USA, the Disney brothers initially started working in their uncle Robert Disney's garage at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, then in October 1923 formally launched their studio in a small office on the rear side of a real estate agency's office at 4651 Kingswell Avenue. 

Pixar

Pixar got its start in 1974 when New York Institute of Technology's (NYTI) founder Alexander Schure, who was also the owner of a traditional animation studio, established the Computer Graphics Lab (CGL), recruited computer scientists who shared his ambitions about creating the world's first computer-animated film. An estimated $15 million was poured into the computer graphics lab, giving the group everything they desired and drove NYIT into serious financial troubles. But they eventually realized they needed to work in a real film studio in order to reach their goal, and when George Lucas approached them and offered them a job at his studio, six employees decided to move over to Lucasfilm.

While Pixar was looking for investors, Steve Jobs was interested, but Lucas found his offer too low. Yet he accepted it in the end after it turned out to be impossible to find other investors. Jobs, who had recently been fired from Apple Computer, paid $5 million to George Lucas for technology rights and put them and $5 million cash as capital into the company, and joined the board of directors as chairman.

While some of Pixar's first animators were former traditional animators, including John Lasseter, they also came from computer animation or were fresh college graduates. A large number of animators that make up the animation department at Pixar were hired around the time Pixar released A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999). Although Toy Story was a successful film, it was Pixar's first feature film at the time, becoming the first major computer-animation studio to successfully produce theatrical feature films. The majority of the animation industry was (and still is) located in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Pre-Media

1. How has computer science helped animation evolve?
2. How long do you think it takes to create a 1-minute computer generated short animation?

Media

Research

Post-Media