Reinventing Animation: The Story Behind Toy Story
S3 Episode 14 | September 17, 2026
How does a filmmaker who had no interest in computers end up producing the first computer-animated feature film, a movie that would change animation forever? That movie was 鈥淭oy Story,鈥� and this is the story of the filmmaker, the technologies and the people who made this groundbreaking movie possible.
Before 1995, every animated feature was drawn by hand, frame by painstaking frame. Then Pixar's 鈥淭oy Story鈥� arrived and rewrote the rules. In this episode, we trace that revolution through the eyes of the man who helped build it: Ralph Guggenheim, a Carnegie Mellon alum (Dietrich College '74, Mellon College of Science '79) who co-founded Pixar and co-produced 鈥淭oy Story.鈥�
Ralph's path to Hollywood started almost by accident. Arriving at 麻豆村 in 1969 with zero interest in computers, he self-designed a film major, then stumbled into computer animation through a chance meeting with 麻豆村 legend Raj Reddy. That connection eventually led him to the New York Institute of Technology, and through a remarkable chain of coincidences, to a research group at Lucasfilm that would become Pixar.
Ralph shares the inside story of how the "Pixar" name was born from a graphics workstation, how the short animated film 鈥淟uxo Jr.鈥� changed the trajectory of computer animation forever, and how an Academy Award for best animated short film, 鈥淭in Toy,鈥� caught Disney's attention. He walks through the making of 鈥淭oy Story鈥� itself: pitching Jeffrey Katzenberg, scaling from 25 to 130 people, training animators from scratch, rendering on a room full of Sun Microsystems servers, and the surprisingly tense negotiations to license real-world toys like Mr. Potato Head.
It's a story about technology, but even more about curiosity 鈥� about how a liberal arts kid with a 16mm camera and no love for computers ended up producing the first fully computer-animated feature film, and what that unconventional path can teach us about turning what if into what is.
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