© Disney/PixarFounded in 1979 as part of Lucasfilm, Pixar was acquired by Steve Jobs in 1986 and renamed Pixar Animation Studios (Pixar, n.d.). The name Pixar was coined as a faux-Spanish word meaning “to make pictures” (Encyclopædia Britannica, n.d.).
At first, Pixar wasn’t focused on making films at all. The company developed and sold advanced computers such as the Pixar Image Computer. To demonstrate the technical capabilities of this hardware, the studio created animated shorts. To their own surprise, these shorts were not only technically impressive, but also narratively strong. They had the potential to stand on their own as fully-fledged stories. From that point on, Pixar’s focus shifted to making fully animated films (Barker, 2023).
One of those early shorts, Luxo Jr., became iconic. The animation of the bouncing desk lamp became the studio’s recognisable logo. Since 1986, every Pixar film has opened with this animation, a tribute to their origins as pioneers of computer animation (Borthaiser, 2012).
When Pixar released Toy Story in 1995 it revolutionised the film industry. It was the first fully computer-animated feature film ever (Catmull, 2008). Since then, Pixar has established itself as one of the most influential studios in modern cinema, beloved by children and adults alike (Clarke, 2013). Since then, the company has won numerous awards: with ten Oscar nominations and eight wins in the Best Animated Feature category, Pixar holds the record for the most awards since the category was introduced in 2001 (Moore, n.d.).
What sets Pixar apart from other studios is that the company does not buy ideas from outside. Each story is developed from start to finish within its own creative community of artists and animators. In doing so, the studio continues to push the boundaries of what is technically possible in animation (Catmull, 2008). Even when Pixar was acquired by Disney in 2006, again with Steve Jobs at the helm, the studio managed to retain its own identity, including its playful traditions (Moore, n.d.).
Another thing Pixar is known for is its “Easter eggs,” hidden jokes and references that appear as a signature in almost every film. One of the most notable is the number A113, a reference to the classroom at the California Institute of the Arts where many of Pixar’s animators were trained. In Brave, it appears as Roman numerals above the door to the witch’s hut: ACXIII (Pixar Wiki, n.d.).