Pixar Animation Studios is a CGI animation production company based in Emeryville, California. To date, the studio has earned twenty-one Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, and one Grammy, among many other awards, acknowledgments and achievements. It is best known for its CGI-animated feature films which are created with PhotoRealistic RenderMan, its own implementation of the industry-standard Renderman image-rendering API used to generate high-quality images.

Pixar started in 1979 as the Graphics Group, a part of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm before it was bought by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986 and given its current name. The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006 through an all-stock transaction worth US$7.4 billion.

Early history

The team began working on film sequences produced by Lucasfilm or worked collectively with Industrial Light and Magic on special effects. After years of research, and key milestones in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Young Sherlock Holmes, the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple Computer. Jobs paid $5 million to George Lucas and put $5 million as capital into the company. The Computer Division was renamed Pixar, a fake Spanish word meaning "to make pictures" or "to make pixels." A factor contributing to Lucas's sale was an increase in cash flow difficulties following his 1983 divorce, which coincided with the sudden dropoff in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi and the disastrous box-office performance of Howard the Duck. The newly independent company was headed by Dr. Edwin Catmull, President and CEO, and Dr. Alvy Ray Smith, Executive Vice President and Director. Jobs served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Pixar.

Initially, Pixar was a high-end computer hardware company whose core product was the Pixar Image Computer, a system primarily sold to government agencies and the medical community. One of the leading buyers of Pixar Image Computers was Disney Studios, which was using the device as part of their secretive CAPS project, using the machine and custom software to migrate the laborious Ink and Paint part of the 2-D animation process to a more automated and thus efficient method. The Image Computer never sold well. In a bid to drive sales of the system, Pixar employee John Lasseterwho had long been creating short demonstration animations, such as Luxo Jr., to show off the device's capabilitiespremiered his creations at SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics industry's largest convention, to great fanfare.