Toy Story is a 1995 American animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. The first installment in the franchise of the same name, it was the first entirely computer-animated feature film, as well as the first feature film from Pixar. It was directed by John Lasseter and produced by Bonnie Arnold and Ralph Guggenheim, from a screenplay written by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, and Alec Sokolow and a story by Lasseter, Stanton, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft. The film features music by Randy Newman, and was executive-produced by Steve Jobs and Edwin Catmull. The film features the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Annie Potts, R. Lee Ermey, John Morris, Laurie Metcalf, and Erik von Detten.
William Norman McLaren, LL. D. was a Scottish Canadian animator, director and producer known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including hand-drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound. McLaren was also an artist and printmaker, and explored his interest in dance in his films.
Tin Toy is a 1988 American animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short film, which runs for five minutes, stars Tinny, a tin one-man band toy, trying to escape from Billy, a human baby. The third short film produced by the company's small animation division, it was a risky investment: due to the low revenue produced by Pixar's main product, the Pixar Image Computer, the company was under financial constraints.
Knick Knack is a 1989 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar that was written and directed by John Lasseter. The short is about a snow globe snowman who wants to join the other travel souvenirs in a summer-themed party. However, the glass dome that surrounds him prevents him from doing so, thus leading to his many tries to break out of his snow globe. Knick Knack is Pixar's fourth short and the final short produced during the company's tenure as a hardware company.
Geri's Game is a 1997 American animated short film produced by Pixar and written and directed by Jan Pinkava. The short, which shows an elderly man named Geri who competes with himself in a game of chess, was Pixar's first film to feature a human being as its main character; Geri later made a cameo appearance in Toy Story 2 as "The Cleaner", here voiced by Jonathan Harris instead of Bob Peterson.
John Alan Lasseter is an American film director, producer, and animator. He has served as the Head of Animation at Skydance Animation since 2019. Previously, he acted as the chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios, as well as the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering.
Masaaki Yuasa is a Japanese director, screenwriter, and animator affiliated with Science SARU, a Japanese animation studio which he co-founded with producer Eunyoung Choi in 2013. Yuasa previously served as president of Science SARU, but stepped down from this role in 2020. Recognized for his idiosyncratic art style and directorial voice, Yuasa began his career as an animator on the landmark television series Chibi Maruko-chan (1990–1992) and Crayon Shin-chan (1992–present), before moving into directing with the feature film Mind Game (2004) and developing a cult appeal following.
Flushed Away is a 2006 animated adventure comedy film directed by Sam Fell and David Bowers, produced by Cecil Kramer, David Sproxton, and Peter Lord, and written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Chris Lloyd, Joe Keenan and Will Davies. It was the third and final DreamWorks Animation film co-produced with Aardman Features following Chicken Run (2000) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), and was the first Aardman project mostly made in CGI animation as opposed to starting with their usual stop-motion – this was because using water on plasticine models could damage them, and it was complex to render the effect in another way. The film stars the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Shane Richie, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis and Jean Reno. In the film, a pampered fancy rat named Roddy St. James (Jackman) is flushed down the toilet in his Kensington apartment by a sewer rat named Sid (Richie), and befriends a scavenger named Rita Malone (Winslet) in order to get back home while evading a sinister toad (McKellen) and his hench-rats.
George Garnett Dunning was a Canadian filmmaker and animator. He is best known for producing and directing the 1968 film Yellow Submarine.
Technological Threat is a 1988 American animated short made by Brian Jennings and Bill Kroyer and was produced by Kroyer Films. It was an example of early computer animation, integrated with traditional animation, and is itself an allegory for the possibilities of combining the two. The robots and backgrounds were drawn based on computer-generated 3D models, while the dogs and wolves were drawn by hand.
Joanna Priestley is an American contemporary film director, producer, animator and teacher. Her films are in the collections of the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Priestley has had retrospectives at the British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art and Hiroshima International Animation Festival in Japan. Bill Plympton calls her the "Queen of independent animation". Priestley lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Doug Sweetland is an American animator and filmmaker. He directed the short film Presto (2008) and the feature film Storks (2016).
The animated documentary is a moving image form that combines animation and documentary. This form should not be confused with documentaries about movie and TV animation history that feature excerpts.
Gerald Potterton was a Canadian director, animator, producer and writer. He is best known for directing the cult classic Heavy Metal and for his animation work on Yellow Submarine.
Toys in the Attic is a 2009 internationally co-produced stop-motion animated fantasy film directed by Jiří Barta and written by Edgar Dutka and Barta which depicts a community of toys and other objects in an attic who come to life when no human is around. It is an international co-production between the Czech Republic, France, Japan and Slovakia. The film was released first in the Czech Republic on 5 March 2009 and has been shown subtitled at film festivals internationally. An American English dub – adapted, produced and directed by Vivian Schilling and performed by actors including Forest Whitaker, Joan Cusack, Cary Elwes and Schilling herself – has been recorded, which the film was first shown with on 3 March 2012 at the New York International Children's Film Festival and was released nationally on 24 August 2012 by Hannover House.
Bobby Yeah is a British stop motion adult animated surreal psychological body horror short film written, directed and animated by Robert Morgan. It was made independently and completed in 2011, and later uploaded on Robert's YouTube Channel in HD in 2017.
Steve Segal is an American animator and filmmaker known for his independent animated shorts as well as his contribution to Pixar films like Toy Story. He teaches animation at the California College of the Arts and has also been a professor in the animation department at Academy of Art University, San Francisco, California.
Mirai is a 2018 Japanese animated adventure fantasy comedy film written and directed by Mamoru Hosoda and produced by Studio Chizu. It premiered on May 16, 2018 at Directors' Fortnight and released in Japan on July 20, 2018. The film stars the voices of Moka Kamishiraishi, Haru Kuroki, Gen Hoshino, Kumiko Aso, Mitsuo Yoshihara, Yoshiko Miyazaki, Kōji Yakusho and Masaharu Fukuyama.
My Father's Dragon is a 2022 animated fantasy adventure comedy film directed by Nora Twomey with a screenplay by Meg LeFauve who co-wrote the story with John Morgan. It is based on the 1948 children's novel of the same name by Ruth Stiles Gannett. The film is also dedicated to Morgan who had since died. It stars the voices of Jacob Tremblay, Gaten Matarazzo, Golshifteh Farahani, Dianne Wiest, Rita Moreno, Chris O'Dowd, Judy Greer, Alan Cumming, Yara Shahidi, Jackie Earle Haley, Whoopi Goldberg, and Ian McShane.
João Gonzalez is a Portuguese film director and animator based in Porto. He is mostly known for writing and directing the multi-award-winning short film Ice Merchants, which premiered and was awarded at Cannes Film Festival the same year. On January 24, 2023, "Ice Merchants" became the first Portuguese production to ever receive an Academy Award nomination.
