Pixar Celebrates 25 Years!!!

Today, Februry 3rd, marks Pixar's 25th anniversary!! It all started 25 years ago, with movie shorts and that soon grew to films, Toy Story. And that grew, what is now, the greatest animation film company today! Here's a little history about 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 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.^[9] In a bid to drive sales of the system, Pixar employee John Lasseter—who had long been creating short demonstration animations, such asLuxo Jr., to show off the device's capabilities—premiered his creations at SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics industry's largest convention, to great fanfare.^[9]

As poor sales of Pixar's computers threatened to put the company out of business, Lasseter's animation department began producing computer-animated commercials for outside companies. Early successes included campaigns for Tropicana, Listerine, and LifeSavers.^[10] In April 1990 Jobs sold Pixar's hardware division, including all proprietary hardware technology and imaging software, to Vicom Systems, and transferred 18 of Pixar's approximate 100 employees. The same year Pixar moved from San Rafael to Richmond, California.^[11] During this period, Pixar continued its relationship with Walt Disney Feature Animation, a studio whose corporate parent would ultimately become its most important partner. In 1991, after a tough start of the year when about 30 employees in the company's computer department had to go (including the company's president, Chuck Kolstad),^[12] which reduced the total number of employees to just 42,^[13] Pixar made a $26 million deal with Disney to produce three computer-animated feature films, the first of which was Toy Story. At that point, the software programmers, who were doing RenderMan and CAPS, and Lasseter’s animation department, who made television commercials and a few shorts for Sesame Street, was all that was left of Pixar.^[14]

Despite the total income of these products, the company was still losing money, and Jobs often considered selling it. Even as late as 1994, Jobs contemplated selling Pixar to other companies, among them Microsoft. Only after confirming that Disney would distribute Toy Story for the 1995 holiday season did he decide to give it another chance.^[15] The film went on to gross more than $350 million worldwide.^[16] Later that year, Pixar held its initial public offering on November 29, 1995, and the company's stock was priced at US$22 per share.