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.
The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature is given each year for the best animated film. An animated feature is defined by the academy as a film with a running time of more than 40 minutes in which characters' performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique, a significant number of the major characters are animated, and animation figures in no less than 75 percent of the running time. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was first awarded in 2002 for films released in 2001.
Pixar Animation Studios is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Since 2006, Pixar has been a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, a segment of the Walt Disney Company.
The Special Achievement Award is an Academy Award given for an achievement that makes an exceptional contribution to the motion picture for which it was created, but for which there is no annual award category. Many of the film projects that received these awards were noted for breaking new ground in terms of technology, where an awards category simply did not yet exist for the given area. New awards categories were often opened in following years. For example, Toy Story was awarded a special achievement award as the first computer-animated feature film in 1996, before the best animated feature category debuted in 2001.
Toy Story 2 is a 1999 American animated adventure comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. The second installment in the Toy Story franchise and the sequel to Toy Story (1995), it was directed by John Lasseter, co-directed by Ash Brannon and Lee Unkrich, and produced by Helene Plotkin and Karen Robert Jackson, from a screenplay written by Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin, and Chris Webb, and a story conceived by Lasseter, Stanton, Brannon, and Pete Docter. In the film, Woody is stolen by a toy collector, prompting Buzz Lightyear and his friends to rescue him, but Woody is then tempted by the idea of immortality in a museum. Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Annie Potts, R. Lee Ermey, John Morris, and Laurie Metcalf reprise their roles from the first Toy Story film and they are joined by Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Estelle Harris, Wayne Knight, and Jodi Benson, who play the new characters introduced in this film. This is the last Toy Story film to feature Varney as the voice of Slinky Dog before his death the following year.
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.
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.
Peter Hans Docter is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and animator. He has served as the chief creative officer (CCO) of Pixar Animation Studios since 2018, and is best known for directing the animated feature films Monsters, Inc. (2001), Up (2009), Inside Out (2015), and Soul (2020). He has been nominated for nine Oscars and has won three for Best Animated Feature—for Up, Inside Out and Soul—making him the first person in history to win the category three times. He has also been nominated for nine Annie Awards, a BAFTA Children's Film Award and a Hochi Film Award. He has described himself as a "geeky kid from Minnesota who likes to draw cartoons".
Andrew Ayers Stanton is an American filmmaker and voice actor based at Pixar, which he joined in 1990. His film work includes co-writing and co-directing Pixar's A Bug's Life (1998), directing Finding Nemo (2003) and its sequel Finding Dory (2016), WALL-E (2008), and the live-action film, Disney's John Carter (2012), and co-writing all four Toy Story films (1995–2019) and Monsters, Inc. (2001).
The 61st Academy Awards ceremony, organized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 1988 and took place on Wednesday, March 29, 1989, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, beginning at 6:00 p.m. PST / 9:00 p.m. EST. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards in 23 categories. The ceremony, televised in the United States by ABC, was produced by Allan Carr and directed by Jeff Margolis. Ten days earlier, in a ceremony held at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, the Academy Awards for Technical Achievement were presented by host Angie Dickinson.
Joseph Henry Ranft was an American animator, screenwriter, and voice actor. He worked for Pixar Animation Studios and Disney at Walt Disney Animation Studios and Disney Television Animation. His younger brother Jerome Ranft is a sculptor who also worked on several Pixar films.
Ralph Eggleston was an American animator, art director, storyboard artist, and production designer at Pixar Animation Studios. He won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for For the Birds.
WALL-E is a 2008 American animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Andrew Stanton, produced by Jim Morris, and written by Stanton and Jim Reardon. It stars the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, with Sigourney Weaver and Fred Willard. The film follows a solitary robot named WALL-E on a future, uninhabitable, deserted Earth in 2805, left to clean up garbage. He is visited by a robot called EVE sent from the starship Axiom, with whom he falls in love and pursues across the galaxy.
Darla Kay Anderson is an American film producer who formerly worked at Pixar Animation Studios. She sits on the national board of directors for the Producers Guild of America.
Up is a 2009 American animated comedy-drama adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Pete Docter, co-directed by Bob Peterson, and produced by Jonas Rivera. Docter and Peterson also wrote the film's screenplay and story, with Tom McCarthy co-writing the latter. The film stars the voices of Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai, and Bob Peterson. The film centers on Carl Fredricksen (Asner), an elderly widower who travels to South America with wilderness explorer Russell (Nagai) in order to fulfill a promise that he made to his late wife Ellie. Along the way, they meet a talking dog named Dug (Peterson) and encounter a giant bird named Kevin, who is being hunted by the explorer Charles Muntz (Plummer), whom Carl had idolized in childhood.
Toy Story is an American media franchise owned by The Walt Disney Company. It centers on toys that, unknown to humans, are secretly living, sentient creatures. It began in 1995 with the release of the animated feature film of the same name, which focuses on a diverse group of toys featuring a classic cowboy doll named Sheriff Woody and a modern spaceman action figure named Buzz Lightyear.
Joshua Cooley is an American filmmaker, storyboard artist, and voice actor. He made his feature directorial debut with the Pixar animated film Toy Story 4 (2019), the fourth film in the Toy Story franchise, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He is also directing the upcoming animated film Transformers One (2024), a prequel to the Transformers franchise. Prior, he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Inside Out (2015), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Dana Leigh Murray is an American animator and film producer, best known for being the producer on the 2020 Pixar film Soul, for which she has won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards, alongside its director and co-producer Pete Docter.
Inside Out: Original Soundtrack is the soundtrack album to Disney/Pixar's 2015 film of the same name, produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by Pete Docter, the film featured musical score composed by Michael Giacchino. This is the second collaboration between Giacchino and Docter, after previously working on Up, which fetched the former, an Academy Award for Best Original Score. Giacchino termed the score as "more emotional in comparison to the score for Up" and also being "more personal" due to his experience on parenthood. The score was recorded within January and May 2015, and featured more orchestral and symphonic music accompanied by a range of instruments, from piano, guitar, drum, organ and harp.
