Six-year-old Andy is in his room playing with his toys. His favorite is a cowboy doll named Woody. When Andy leaves his room, all the toys . Woody tells them it is Andy's birthday. The toys begin to worry that Andy will get a new toy that he'll like better than them. At his party, Andy opens his last present—an action figure named Buzz Light-year. Buzz wears a spacesuit. He does not know he is a toy. He believes he is to save the planet. All the other toys love Buzz Light-year—all except Woody. Woody is upset. He throws Buzz out the window!
Toy Story was a movie made by Walt Disney Productions and Pixar
Animation Studios. It was shown for the first time in 1995 and was the first full-length computer-generated movie. That means it was the first movie ever made entirely on computers. It was a big success, and it opened the way for more computer-generated films, such as A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, Cars, and many others.
Animation is the process of making a drawing appear to move, and it has for centuries. In earlier times, it was done with simple but clever devices that made pieces of paper move quickly. To the human eye, the in the pictures appeared to move. It took hundreds of drawings for just a few moments of action. Even in more modern times, animation was a long and difficult process. Artists spent hundreds of hours making drawings. Each drawing showed a figure with a slight change. Thousands of these drawings were put together and photographed on a length of film called a reel. When the film was played back rapidly, it made an animated cartoon.
The first animations on celluloid, or clear sheets of film, were made around 1914 by Earl Hurd. Hurd learned that by using celluloid, one could be put on top of another. For example, an artist could draw a cat. If only the cat's ears were going to move, the cat didn't have to be drawn over and over. Only the ears had to be drawn and placed over the rest of the cat. Animated cartoons such as Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown, and, of course, Mickey Mouse became very popular.
Walt Disney made great changes in animation. He was the first to add color and sound to a cartoon film. In 1937, he produced the first full-length animated movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In those days, making an animated movie was a slow and difficult process. For Snow White alone, Disney used 300 artists. They worked as teams 24 hours a day, seven days a week for over six months. The cost to make the film was six times what Walt Disney thought it would be, but the movie was a huge success. Afterward, Disney made one animated movie after another. Eventually, there were studios all over the world making animated films.
Today, the large animation studios are using computers to make most
of their films. Computer animation uses very advanced technology. The history of computer animation started almost fifty years ago, and developing computer animation was a slow process that took many years. First, General Motors and IBM to help design cars, created a computer-drawing system. Then in 1961, Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), designed a computer program called Sketchpad. This program allowed a person to draw a figure on an electronic drawing with a special pen called a light pen. The pad sent signals that made lines and marks appear on a computer screen.
In the 1960s and 1970s, computer animation was used mostly for industrial and scientific purposes. For example, it was used in weather maps to storms and other weather events. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg began using computers to create exciting sounds and images—special effects—in their films.
In 1986, a group of animators—people who create animation—got
together and created their own company called Pixar. It took them twenty years of dreaming, planning, and hard work to create Toy Story. First, they had to come up with the idea for the story and write it down. Then they drew the characters. Each character was drawn several times before the final character was decided upon. Sculptures of each of the characters were made. Then the actors, such as Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, recorded their voices. The artists watched the actors carefully. Their expressions gave them ideas for the looks and movements of the cartoon characters. Finally, the animators were ready to create the images on their computers. They created a new computer program called Render Man. It became Pixar's greatest to the world of computer animation.
Today, computer animation is used in movies, television, music videos, commercials, video games, and in science and business all over the world. Even ordinary people can create simple animated figures on their home computers. Technology continues to improve, making animation faster, easier, and more realistic. Maybe someday computer images will be so advanced that we won't be able to tell the difference between real people and animated figures!
And what happened to Woody and Buzz Light-year? They eventually together in a dangerous situation and learned to work together.
