What did it take to make the first computer-animated feature film?

It took computers finally cheap and powerful enough, a team of animators, and an enormous amount of computer time. Toy Story (1995) was the first entirely computer-animated feature film, and the first feature produced by Pixar. Its director, John Lasseter, had been fired from Disney after pitching The Brave Little Toaster as a fully computer-animated film. Pixar's short Tin Toy (1988) then won the 1989 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the first computer-generated film to do so. Pixar's founders had long wanted to make a feature, but only by the early 1990s were computers cheap and powerful enough.

Each character was a model with controls, and the most complex, Woody, needed 723 motion controls, including 212 for his face and 58 for his mouth. Animators posed the characters at key frames, using Pixar's Menv software, and let the software do the inbetweening. They still did the lip sync by hand: a week per eight seconds of animation, because Lasseter felt automatic lip syncing would not convey a character's emotions properly.

The computer did what hand drawing could not. For a 30-second test shown to Disney, Lasseter wanted things that could not be done in hand-drawn animation: Woody's plaid shirt, reflections in Buzz's helmet and Venetian blind shadows across Andy's room.

The film required 800,000 machine hours and 114,240 frames of animation, divided into 1,561 shots totalling over 77 minutes. Pixar could render less than 30 seconds of the film per day.