Toy Story proved a full feature could be pure CGI
Computer animation grew from lab demos and wire-frame hands into Saturday-morning series and blockbuster features. Below about twelve frames a second, motion looks jerky; theaters run twenty-four. By 1995, Pixar and Disney turned digital models into Toy Story, the first full-length movie made entirely on computers.
Computer animation means digitally generating moving images; CGI covers stills and motion alike, while animation names the moving half. It succeeds stop-motion and hand-drawn work by manipulating digital stand-ins frame by frame. Smooth motion usually needs around twelve frames per second or more; U.S. theatrical projection runs at twenty-four. Three-dimensional pipelines model objects, rig virtual skeletons, set keyframes, then let software interpolate—or "tween"—the in-betweens before rendering and compositing.
History started in research labs. At Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1960s, Edward Zajac, Frank Sinden, Kenneth Knowlton, and Michael Noll experimented with digital moving images; work also occurred at Lawrence Livermore. Charles Csuri collaborated with James Shaffer on Hummingbird in 1967, and Nikolai Konstantinov used a BESM-4 machine for Kitty in 1968. Futureworld (1976) put a spinning wire-frame hand and face on cinema screens—images University of Utah alumni Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke had developed in their student short A Computer Animated Hand.
Feature footholds arrived when 1982's Wrath of Khan sequel and Tron put CGI on screen, joined the next year by anime Golgo 13: The Professional. VeggieTales (1993) was the first American fully 3D series sold direct-to-video; ReBoot (September 1994) was the first full-length computer-animated television series. Toy Story (1995), from Disney and Pixar, became the first feature-length computer-animated film. Later titles such as Avatar (2009) and The Jungle Book (2016) blend CGI with live actors, while photoreal projects like The Lion King (2019) blur marketing lines between animation and live action. SIGGRAPH remains the yearly showcase for the craft's advancing tools.
Source: Computer animation
