Toy Story, released in theaters on November 22, 1995, was the first feature-length motion picture rendered entirely with computer-generated imagery. Produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter, it represented the culmination of nearly two decades of research that began in university computer graphics labs, continued at the New York Institute of Technology and Lucasfilm, and matured at Pixar after the company’s 1986 founding.
Every frame of the film was generated by software rather than drawn or photographed. Pixar’s own RenderMan history page states plainly that the Reyes-based RenderMan technology “allowed Pixar to make the first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story (1995).” The film therefore stands as the moment when the research thread running through the z-buffer, texture mapping, the Reyes architecture, and programmable shading was assembled into a complete production pipeline capable of sustaining a ninety-minute narrative.
The technical scale was substantial for the mid-1990s. The film was rendered on a farm of networked workstations, with the complete production consuming on the order of hundreds of thousands of machine-hours of rendering. Each shot had to be modeled, animated, shaded, lit, and rendered through RenderMan, and the studio had to solve practical problems of data management, scheduling, and consistency that had never been faced at feature length before.
In the Computer History Museum oral history he recorded as a 2013 CHM Fellow, Ed Catmull describes how producing a fully computer-generated feature had been a stated goal of his since his earliest days in the field, and how the founding and financing of Pixar were oriented, over time, toward making that goal achievable. Toy Story validated that long-term bet both technically and commercially.
The film’s success did more than prove a single pipeline worked. It established computer animation as a viable commercial medium and accelerated the industry-wide shift away from traditional cel animation. Pixar’s “Our Story” page frames Toy Story as the start of a continuous line of computer-animated features, and the techniques it relied upon, including RenderMan and subdivision surfaces, spread across the entire field of feature animation and visual effects.