Exactly thirty years ago, on November 22, 1995, a modest-looking animated film about sentient toys quietly rolled into theaters and rewrote the rulebook of moviemaking. Toy Story, the world’s first feature-length movie created entirely with computer-generated imagery (CGI), opened to $39.1 million domestically over the Thanksgiving weekend and eventually grossed $373 million worldwide on a $30 million budget. More importantly, it launched Pixar Animation Studios into the stratosphere and kicked off an animation revolution that still dominates the industry today.
You can find Toy Story on Amazon HERE or Disney+.
Directed by John Lasseter and produced by a then-little-known studio in Point Richmond, California, Toy Story starred Tom Hanks as Woody, a pull-string cowboy doll and the longtime favorite toy of a boy named Andy, and Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear, a flashy new space-ranger action figure who believes he’s a real astronaut. The film’s central conflict—Woody’s jealousy giving way to friendship as the two toys fight to get back to Andy before the family moves—gave audiences a heartfelt buddy comedy wrapped in groundbreaking technology.
The origins of Toy Story stretch back to the late 1980s. John Lasseter, a former Disney animator fired in 1983 for pushing too aggressively for computer animation, joined Lucasfilm’s nascent computer graphics division. When George Lucas sold that group to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million, Pixar was born (originally as the Graphics Group, later rebranded). For years the company survived primarily by selling high-end rendering hardware and producing award-winning short films like Luxo Jr. (1986) and Tin Toy (1988), the latter of which became the first computer-animated film to win an Oscar.
By 1991, with hardware sales flagging, Pixar signed a three-picture deal with Disney worth $26 million. The first project was originally titled Toy Story and envisioned as a 30-minute TV special, then a musical, before evolving into the 81-minute theatrical feature we know today. Early story reels were dark—Woody was a sarcastic, unlikable jerk (think a ventriloquist-dummy version of Al Pacino). Disney executives nearly pulled the plug in 1993 during the infamous “Black Friday” screening. Lasseter and his team—writers Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, and Alec Sokolow—spent two frantic weeks rewriting the script to make Woody more sympathetic. Production resumed, and the final film retained only about 5% of that original dark storyline.
Technically, the achievement was staggering. A team of roughly 110 people (tiny by today’s standards) rendered 114,240 frames over three years on a “render farm” of 117 Sun SPARCstation 20 workstations. The average frame took anywhere from 45 minutes to 30 hours to render. Human characters were deliberately kept off-screen as much as possible because realistic skin and hair were still years away. Even Sid’s grotesque mutant toys were a clever workaround—less geometry to animate.
Critics embraced it immediately. Roger Ebert gave it four stars, calling it “a marvel of animation and a joyous playtime for the imagination.” It earned a Special Achievement Oscar for John Lasseter (the first ever given for an animated feature) and three regular nominations, including Best Original Screenplay—the first animated film ever nominated in that category.
The ripple effects were seismic. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion. The Toy Story franchise has now grossed over $3 billion across four films and countless shorts, with Toy Story 5 slated for 2026. The technological foundation laid in 1995 made possible everything from A Bug’s Life to Finding Nemo, WALL-E, Up, and beyond. DreamWorks Animation, Illumination, Sony Pictures Animation, and even live-action blockbusters leaning on CGI all trace their lineage back to that November weekend in 1995.
Three decades later, Woody’s line “To infinity and beyond!” remains a cultural touchstone, and the sight of a computer-animated cowboy and spaceman riding a moving truck still feels magical. On its 30th anniversary, Toy Story isn’t just a classic—it’s the Big Bang of modern animation.
You can find Toy Story on Amazon HERE or Disney+.
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