The CGI in this movie obviously shows it's age but it was interesting to see how CGI looked 25 years ago. "It was the first entirely computer-animated feature film, as well as the first feature film from Pixar." [0]
From the rendering it's obviously worse than what we could do today in real-time but I assume at that time it was amazing. However, I was most impressed by the animations. I would assume they didn't have things like motion/performance capturing at that time and likely not even decent skeletal animation / rigging systems to make the animators' lives easier (i.e. it was pretty tricky to create those animations). The story/idea was kinda interesting and there where some funny moments but I was basically only watching it for some CGI history (probably fun to see how the CGI improves towards the 4th movie). Some interesting facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story#Animation ("27 animators worked on the film [...] To sync the characters' mouths and facial expressions to the actors' recorded voices, animators spent a week per eight seconds of animation. [...] rendering on a "render farm" of 117 Sun Microsystems computers [...] Finished animation was produced at a rate of around three minutes a week. Depending on its complexity, each frame took from 45 minutes up to 30 hours to render. The film required 800,000 machine hours and 114,240 frames of animation in total.")
Btw: "Toy Story's cast of characters forms the basis for the naming of the releases of the Debian computer operating system, from Debian 1.1 Buzz, the first release with a codename, in 1996, to Debian 11 Bullseye, the most-recently announced future release." [1] (but Debian Sid is the only "release" I've used that is named after a character from the 1st movie).
Review by Dahj AshaBlockedParent2021-03-23T14:18:59Z
The CGI in this movie obviously shows it's age but it was interesting to see how CGI looked 25 years ago. "It was the first entirely computer-animated feature film, as well as the first feature film from Pixar." [0]
From the rendering it's obviously worse than what we could do today in real-time but I assume at that time it was amazing. However, I was most impressed by the animations. I would assume they didn't have things like motion/performance capturing at that time and likely not even decent skeletal animation / rigging systems to make the animators' lives easier (i.e. it was pretty tricky to create those animations). The story/idea was kinda interesting and there where some funny moments but I was basically only watching it for some CGI history (probably fun to see how the CGI improves towards the 4th movie).
Some interesting facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story#Animation ("27 animators worked on the film [...] To sync the characters' mouths and facial expressions to the actors' recorded voices, animators spent a week per eight seconds of animation. [...] rendering on a "render farm" of 117 Sun Microsystems computers [...] Finished animation was produced at a rate of around three minutes a week. Depending on its complexity, each frame took from 45 minutes up to 30 hours to render. The film required 800,000 machine hours and 114,240 frames of animation in total.")
Btw: "Toy Story's cast of characters forms the basis for the naming of the releases of the Debian computer operating system, from Debian 1.1 Buzz, the first release with a codename, in 1996, to Debian 11 Bullseye, the most-recently announced future release." [1] (but Debian Sid is the only "release" I've used that is named after a character from the 1st movie).
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story#Other_influences