What do you get when you combine 28 animators, 117 dual and quad-processor SPARCstation 20 systems in a Renderfarm, 1,300 Renderman Shaders, 4.5 million lines of object code, and 34 terabytes of Renderman data files?
You end up with a 79 minute computer-generated animated movie that takes you on an adventure with two toys who put aside their differences to find their way back home. Information and statistics in this article were from http://www.toystory.com, http://www.sun.com, and Computer Graphics World, August 1995.
Toy Story, which opened nationwide on November 22, tells the story of Woody, an old cowboy rag doll with a pull string voice box, and Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger action figure full of blinky lights and exciting sounds. The two toys have strong rivalry in the beginning, but slowly they learn that they need each other to survive the world outside of Andy's room. While the story follows a traditional Disney-esque plot, it has plenty of adult humor sprinkled throughout. The result is a movie that can be enjoyed by adults and children alike.
In 1991, Disney and Pixar agreed to produce Toy Story in two to three years. Though they finished a little later than estimated, the wait was well worth it. Viewers may want to see the movie more than once so they can appreciate the technical aspects of the film. Pixar did a nice job developing models and shaders to represent the toys of our childhood, from the lovable Slinky Dog to Mr. Potato Head. The environments include some incredible outdoor scenarios that were oftentimes difficult to distinguish from a live film. The texturing on Hannah's hair and the upholstery had a very realistic feel. The only downside is that some of the human characters were a bit unbelievable. Their actions didn't quite mesh with the actions we typically associate with humans. For instance, early in the film Andy, the boy who owns the toys, picks up his little sister. The actions Andy takes don't quite match with what a human actor would look like. This obstacle isn't insurmountable, however. The industry can use motion-capture devices to control the actions of their characters along with traditional rotoscoping techniques to give the characters a more genuine feel.
Problems with human characters aside, Toy Story is one of the monumental achievements of film. It will fall alongside other classic films, such as Snow White - the first animated full-feature and the Wizard of Oz which had a large impact on color films.
So the real question is - what impact will this film have on the computer industry? With the success of Toy Story, the entertainment industry is now exploring areas of computer entertainment. The industry needs more than artists to make movies like this possible. Application developers are needed to create 3D programs, effects and shaders; as well as to develop the massively parallel renderfarm which took only 800,000 computer hours to generate the film's 114,240 frames. As a side note, if the producers began rendering Toy Story today on an average one-processor home computer, and the computer was used exclusively for the purpose of frame rendering, the animation would be complete in approximately 43 years.
If you are interested in computer animation or graphics, you may want to look into attending SIGGRAPH '96 in New Orleans. At SIGGRAPH, you get a chance to see some of the latest advances as well as a chance to make connections with others in the industry. It was at SIGGRAPH '95 that my love for Toy Story developed. There, I was shown a short trailer featuring the marching plastic soldiers spying on the new toy. Toy Story is definitely a movie worth seeing at least twice, once for the plot and once to appreciate the technical merit.