SIGGRAPH 2025 will open this August with a special tribute to a film that transformed animation, technology, and storytelling: Toy Story.
To mark the 30th anniversary of the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film, the conference will host a celebratory event honouring Pixar’s groundbreaking achievement — and the SIGGRAPH community that helped make it possible.
Presented by the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival in partnership with ACM SIGGRAPH Pioneers, the event will take place August 10-14 at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
The celebration begins at with a keynote by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and a pioneer in computer graphics. The talk will explore the challenges and breakthroughs that made Toy Story a reality — many of which trace their roots back to SIGGRAPH itself.
“SIGGRAPH wasn’t just a conference; it was our lifeline,” said Catmull. “The breakthroughs shared openly — on lighting, shading, rendering — became the building blocks we stitched together to make Toy Story.”
Following the keynote and audience Q&A, attendees will enjoy trivia, giveaways, and a 4K screening of Toy Story, transporting them back to the moment the CG animation revolution began.
Released in 1995, Toy Story was the culmination of years of technical ingenuity and artistic ambition. From realistic surface rendering to character modeling and lighting, the challenges were immense. Solutions emerged through a collaborative ecosystem of universities, studios, and SIGGRAPH presentations — from stochastic sampling developed at Lucasfilm to the illumination models at Cornell and early ray tracing research from the University of North Carolina.
Before Woody and Buzz became household names, Pixar nervously previewed early test footage at SIGGRAPH. “We didn’t know how it would be received,” recalled Bill Reeves, Toy Story’s supervising technical director. “Everyone sat in silence as we waited for the footage to finish. When the applause erupted, it was a mind-blowing moment. We knew we were on to something big.”
The film’s legacy has only grown. Pete Docter, a supervising animator on Toy Story and now Pixar’s chief creative officer, reflected on the team’s youthful audacity. “At the time, we were too inexperienced to consider that it might fail. Maybe that’s why it worked,” he said. “What we understood was that the film’s success would depend on its story and characters.”
Dawn Fidrick, SIGGRAPH 2025’s Computer Animation Festival Director, said Toy Story proved CG wasn’t just a technical feat — it was a storytelling medium. “It showed computer graphics could create life, emotion, and timeless stories,” she said.
Thirty years on, Toy Story remains a cornerstone of modern animation, and SIGGRAPH continues to foster the same spirit of curiosity, collaboration, and creativity that fueled Pixar’s rise.
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