Geri's Game is a 1997 American animated short film produced by Pixar and written and directed by Jan Pinkava.

[3] For the first of these shorts, which would be the first one made in 8 years, Catmull wanted Pixar to create a story which featured a human as its central protagonist.

The latter idea was inspired by Pinkava and his elderly relatives' love of chess—particularly his grandfather, an avid chess player who would often play rounds of the game with only himself.

[2] Pinkava, who grew up in Czechoslovakia, was inspired by the works of Czech filmmaker and storywriter Jiří Trnka, particularly his stop-motion puppet films; Trnka's characters, usually human ones, were marionette puppets that had vastly stylized body and facial features, which Pinkava similarly applied somewhat to Geri's character design, with facial attributes such as his nose and chin.

[2] Pinkava did several maquettes of different designs for Geri before settling on his final appearance, which he then sculpted into a (3D) clay model that was baked by Jerome Ranft and digitally scanned into Pixar's animation software.

[7][8][9] To achieve the goal of producing a believable 3D human character, two people were brought on to do research for the project: Michael Kass, who did the calculations behind the physics for a dynamic cloth system, and Tony DeRose, who made use of subdivision surfaces, a technique invented by Catmull in conjunction with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, which allowed for more lifelike skin surfaces.

[2][10] Previously, most 3D character surfaces were crafted using several non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) that had to be "stitched" together, which made for less expressive movement and caused models to frequently tear.

DeRose had been working on the technology at the University of Washington, and had already brought subdivision surfaces to CAD makers, who were ultimately unconvinced, and held their faith in NURBS, before bringing it to Pixar, which was much more receptive.

According to Pinkava, Steve Jobs, upon a hearing about the issue, had offered to help him by enlisting tailor Giorgio Armani to help them design an outfit for Geri, which he ultimately declined.

It took roughly a year to produce, according to Pinkava, largely due to the amount of time allotted to developing the cloth simulation.

Despite this, there were 18 different animators[3] that worked on the project (including Pixar storywriter Pete Docter, who contributed a few scenes out of sheer interest[2]).