Toy Story is one of the most beloved animated movie franchises of all time. Toy Story was also a groundbreaking movie when it came to technology. The movie, starring Tim Allen, Tom Hanks, Don Rickles, and many others, was the first movie to be entirely computer-animated.
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Toy Story was also the first movie made by Pixar, with Apple’s Steve Jobs taking the role of executive producer. Jobs had seen an opportunity to get into movie production technology by buying Pixar in 1986, which was a part of Lucasfilms but did not carry the Pixar name.
Pixar worked on shorts at the onset and seemed to concentrate on promoting its software and computers more than full-on film production. In 1986 the company released Luxo Jr., which won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.
The main character in Luxo Jr. was a lamp that has become iconic in the Pixar branding. Pixar also released its RenderMan software which filmmakers could use to render computer graphics into films. While the company began developing software and computers to showcase its capabilities, it decided to take it a step further in 1991and started collaborating with Disney.
The two companies were working on what was to become Toy Story and was released in North America on November 22nd, 1995. The movie grossed $373million worldwide in 1995 alone and $192million in the U.S. The movie made its premiere a few days before at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles before its official release. The movie also holds a 100% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a 92% rating from the audience.
It was praised for the technical innovation of the 3D animation, wit and thematic sophistication of the screenplay, musical score, and vocal performances (particularly Hanks and Allen); it is considered by many to be one of the best animated films ever made.
The film received three Academy Award nominations (Best Original Screenplay (the first animated film to be nominated for this award), Best Original Song for “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”, and Best Original Score) as well as winning a Special Achievement Academy Award. In 2005, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. The success of Toy Story launched a multimedia franchise and a series of three sequels, starting with Toy Story 2 (1999).
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