In February 2009, Pixar executives John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich were presented with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Film Festival.

[citation needed] Edwin Catmull and Malcolm Blanchard were the first to be hired and were soon joined by Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco some months later, who were the four original members of the Computer Graphics Lab, located in a converted two-story garage acquired from the former Vanderbilt-Whitney estate.

[10][11] Schure invested significant funds into the computer graphics lab, approximately $15 million, providing the resources the group needed but contributing to NYIT's financial difficulties.

During the following months, they gradually resigned from CGL, found temporary jobs for about a year to avoid making Schure suspicious, and joined the Graphics Group at Lucasfilm.

After moving to Lucasfilm, the team worked on creating the precursor to RenderMan, called REYES (for "renders everything you ever saw"), and developed several critical technologies for CG — including particle effects and various animation tools.

[18] John Lasseter was hired to the Lucasfilm team for a week in late 1983 with the title "interface designer"; he animated the short film The Adventures of André & Wally B.

After years of research, and key milestones such as the Genesis Effect in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and the Stained Glass Knight in Young Sherlock Holmes,[16] the group, which then numbered 40 individuals, was spun out as a corporation in February 1986 by Catmull and Smith.

[2] With Lucas's 1983 divorce, which coincided with the sudden dropoff in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi, they knew he would most likely sell the whole Graphics Group.

Worried that the employees would be lost to them if that happened, which would prevent the creation of the first computer-animated movie, they concluded that the best way to keep the team together was to turn the group into an independent company.

Eventually, they decided they should be a hardware company in the meantime, with their Pixar Image Computer as the core product, a system primarily sold to governmental, scientific, and medical markets.

At that point, Smith and Catmull had been declined by 35 venture capitalists and ten large corporations,[27] including a deal with General Motors which fell through three days before signing the contracts.

Pixar employee John Lasseter, who had long been working on not-for-profit short demonstration animations, such as Luxo Jr. (1986) to show off the device's capabilities, premiered his creations to great fanfare at SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics industry's largest convention.

[citation needed] During this period of time, Pixar continued its successful relationship with Walt Disney Feature Animation, a studio whose corporate parent would ultimately become its most important partner.

[28] A few months later Pixar made a historic $26 million deal with Disney to produce three computer-animated feature films, the first of which was Toy Story (1995), the product of the technological limitations that challenged CGI.

[41] By then the software programmers working on RenderMan and IceMan, and Lasseter's animation department, which made television commercials (and four Luxo Jr. shorts for Sesame Street the same year), were all that remained of Pixar.

[43] After learning from New York critics that Toy Story would probably be a hit, and confirming that Disney would distribute it for the 1995 Christmas season, he decided to give Pixar another chance.

[46] Toy Story grossed more than $373 million worldwide[47] and, when Pixar held its initial public offering on November 29, 1995, it exceeded Netscape's as the biggest IPO of the year.

[52][53] According to Catmull, it evolved out of the working relationship between Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft on Toy Story.

[51] As a result of the success of Toy Story, Pixar built a new studio at the Emeryville campus which was designed by PWP Landscape Architecture and opened in November 2000.

Profits and production costs were split equally, but Disney exclusively owned all story, character, and sequel rights and also collected a 10- to 15-percent distribution fee.

An added benefit of delaying Cars from November 4, 2005, to June 9, 2006, was to extend the time frame remaining on the Pixar-Disney contract, to see how things would play out between the two companies.

The transaction catapulted Jobs, who owned 49.65% of total share interest in Pixar, to Disney's largest individual shareholder with 7%, valued at $3.9 billion, and a new seat on its board of directors.

[63] After the deal closed in May 2006, Lasseter revealed that Iger had felt that Disney needed to buy Pixar while watching a parade at the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland in September 2005.

Disney's EVP of Theatrical Distribution Tony Chambers stated "After a disappointing opening weekend, we're really pleased that audiences have discovered what a great movie it is.

The first of several buildings, the high-tech structure designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson[109] has special foundations and electricity generators to ensure continued film production, even through major earthquakes.

"[114] Actor John Ratzenberger, who had previously starred in the television series Cheers (1982–1993), has voiced a character in every Pixar feature film from Toy Story through Onward (2020).

In a 2023 interview, Pixar's president Jim Morris stated that one of the reasons why their films have expensive budgets is because they are produced entirely in the U.S. with all of the artists under one roof, while almost all of their competitors keep costs down by doing work offshore.

Expressing doubts about the strength of the material, John Lasseter convinced the Pixar team to start from scratch and make the sequel their third full-length feature film.

[130] Shortly after its release, Pixar's chief creative officer Pete Docter confirmed that the studio would take a break from sequels and focus on original projects.

[143] An original show entitled Win or Lose, which will follow a middle school softball team the week leading up to the big championship game where each episode will be from a different perspective, will premiere on Disney+ on February 19, 2025.