Happy 20th Birthday Toy Story, you are still one of the best animated films

Toy Story is the first ever full length computer animated motion picture. Presented by Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar made the film using computer generated 3 dimensional toy models.

The story is about toys that look lifeless when people are around and get into action otherwise. The main characters of the movie are Woody, a pull-string toy and Buzz Lightyear, an astronaut toy who thinks he can fly with his toy wings and can shoot with his laser.

The use of 3 dimensional characters in the movie was a novel approach, huge computing render farms were used to make the shots in the movie. Some of these frames took upto 30 hours to render and the computers are run all the time. The computers would calculate and generate every element of the frame including the shadows and it was a very computing intensive job.

Despite the use of a lot of computing power, Toy Story was rendered at a resolution of 1536x922 which is slightly above HD. Rendering at higher resolutions in a specified time would have required more computing power from bigger render farms. Tom Hanks did the voice over for Woody.

Pixar had to get the movie right to stay in business and the movie turned out to be a blockbuster, they spent 30 million dollars in making it and the film grossed 360+ million dollars out of which 190+ million dollars was made in US and Canada together.

The film was nominated for 3 Academy Awards out of which it won one, and was also nominated for 2 Golden Globe Awards. Apart from being a movie of technological breakthrough's, it is still one of the favorite movies of all 90's kids, like me. Happy Birthday Toys.

^{Via Youtube | MoviesHistory}

^{Via Youtube | MoviesHistory}