Pixar

What It Is

Pixar Animation Studios is the California-based studio that invented modern CGI animation and changed the course of filmmaking forever. Originally a small computer graphics division inside Lucasfilm, Pixar was spun off as an independent company in 1986 with backing from Steve Jobs. In 1995, the studio released Toy Story, the world's first fully computer-animated feature film, proving that CGI could tell a story with the same emotional power as any hand-drawn film. Since then, Pixar has produced some of the most beloved animated films ever made, including Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, Up, Inside Out, and Coco. What sets Pixar apart is not just the quality of its storytelling but the extraordinary science and technology that make each film possible. Every movie Pixar releases requires solving technical problems that have never been solved before, and the studio employs mathematicians, physicists, software engineers, and computer scientists alongside its artists and directors.

Why It Matters

Pixar's greatest contribution to animation is the proof that art and science are not opposites. They are partners. To animate the ocean in Finding Nemo, Pixar's technical team studied fluid dynamics and built entirely new software to simulate how light behaves underwater. To create Merida's hair in Brave, they developed a system that could simulate more than 100,000 individual curls moving independently and realistically. To bring the fabric and costumes in The Incredibles to life, engineers wrote code that modeled the physics of cloth stretching, folding, and flowing. None of these breakthroughs came from drawing ability alone. They came from animators, scientists, and engineers asking the same question together: how do we make this feel real? For young people who love math, physics, or coding just as much as art, Pixar's story is proof that there is a place for them in animation, and that their scientific curiosity might be exactly what the field needs most.