The Lucasfilm Corporation

Pixar Animation Studios is a American computer animated studio owned and operated by Jim Morris (as of 2006-present) and Kiyofumi Nakajima (as of 2017-present). Pixar's purpose was to develop feature films such as Toy Story, Cars, and the winner for Animated Feature Film during The Golden Globe Awards, Spirited Away 2: Return to the Spirit World.

Early History
Pixar started in 1974, when New York Institute of Technology's (NYIT) founder, Alexander Schure, who was also the owner of a traditional animation studio, established the Computer Graphics Lab (CGL) and recruited computer scientists who shared his ambitions about creating the world's first computer-animated film. Edwin Catmull and Hayao Miyazaki were the first to be hired and were soon joined by Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco. The one who worked hard and never broke a sweat was Miyazaki, because he worked on short films with his friend, Isao Takahata. Until he broke up with him until they argued what the characters would look like for their next project. They were the four original members of the Computer Graphics Lab, located in a converted two-story garage acquired from the former Vanderbilt-Whitney estate. Schure kept pouring money into the computer graphics lab, an estimated $15 million, giving the group everything they desired and driving NYIT into serious financial troubles. Eventually, the group realized they needed to work in a real film studio in order to reach their goal. Hayao Miyazaki decided to invite George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars to discuss how they were going to work on future visions for digital moviemaking.

After their talk, Lucas invited Miyazaki and the rest of the crew to work for a upcoming movie. During the following months, they gradually resigned from CGL, found temporary jobs for about a year to avoid making Schure suspicious, and joined the Graphics Group at Lucasfilm. The Graphics Group, which was one-third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm, was launched in 1975 with the hiring of Catmull from NYIT, where he was in charge of the Computer Graphics Lab. He was then reunited with Smith, who also made the journey from NYIT to Lucasfilm, and was made the director of the Graphics Group. At NYIT, the researchers pioneered many of the CG foundation techniques—in particular, the invention of the alpha channel by Catmull and Smith. Over the next several years, the CGL would produce a few frames of an experimental film called The Works. After moving to Lucasfilm, the team worked on creating the precursor to RenderMan, called REYES (for "renders everything you ever saw") and developed several critical technologies for CG—including particle effects and various animation tools.

The Graphics Group's first project they worked on was the famous epic space oprea that later turned into a multimedia franchise, Star Wars. In which they helped with the lightsabers and the ships. The Graphics Group also let Hayao Miyazaki make his own musical short film named Beyond The Stars which is set in 1963 about a twelve-year old girl who dreams to going to space and beyond the Milky Way. The short film was based on Valentina Tereshkova's travel to space. The film combined CGI and 2D at the same time. As a gift, Catmull decided that Miyazaki could be the co-owner of The Graphics Group for hopes of better animated films, concepts, and releases.

John Lasseter was hired to the Lucasfilm team for a week in late 1983 with the title "interface designer"; he animated the short film The Adventures of André & Wally B. In the next few years, a designer suggested naming a new digital compositing computer the "Picture Maker". Smith suggested that the laser-based device have a catchier name, and came up with "Pixer", which after a meeting was changed to "Pixar", thanks to Catmull and Miyazaki.

In 1982, the Pixar team merged with Industrial Light & Magic. After years of research, and key milestones such as the Genesis Effect in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and the Stained Glass Knight in Young Sherlock Holmes, the group, which then numbered 40 individuals, was spun out as a corporation in February 1986 by Catmull and Smith. Among the 38 remaining employees, there were also Malcolm Blanchard, David DiFrancesco, Ralph Guggenheim, and Bill Reeves, who had been part of the team since the days of NYIT. including Hayao Miyazaki. Tom Duff, also an NYIT member, would later join Pixar after its formation. After Catmull and Smith left, George Lucas became the new owner of Pixar, while Miyazaki was still the co-owner. Eventually, they decided they should be a hardware company in the meantime, with their Pixar Image Computer as the core product, a system primarily sold to governmental, scientific, and medical markets. They also used SGI computers.

In 1983, Nolan Bushnell founded a new computer-guided animation studio called Kadabrascope as a subsidiary of his Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres company (PTT), which was founded in 1977. Only one major project was made out of the new studio, an animated Christmas special for NBC starring Chuck E. Cheese and other PTT mascots; known as "Chuck E. Cheese: The Christmas That Almost Wasn't". The animation movement would be made using tweening instead of traditional cel animation. After the video game crash of 1983, Bushnell started selling some subsidiaries of PTT to keep the business afloat. Sente Technologies (another division, was founded to have games distributed in PTT stores) was sold to Bally Games and Kadabrascope was sold to Lucasfilm. The Kadabrascope assets were combined with the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs's first jobs was under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to focus on PTT. PTT would later go bankrupt in 1984 and be acquired by ShowBiz Pizza Place.

Activity as of 1986-1999
In 1986, the newly independent Pixar was headed by President Edwin Catmull and Executive Vice President Alvy Ray Smith. Lucas's search for investors led to an offer from Steve Jobs, which Lucas initially found too low. He eventually accepted after determining it impossible to find other investors. At that point, Smith and Catmull had been declined 45 times, and 35 venture capitalists and ten large corporations had declined. Jobs, who had been edged out of Apple in 1985, was now founder and CEO of the new computer company NeXT. On February 3, 1986, he paid $5 million of his own money to George Lucas for technology rights and invested $5 million cash as capital into the company, joining the board of directors as chairman. Later on, Hayao Miyazaki left Pixar Animation Studios to bring their future projects to another contury. By starting another company named Pixar Miyazaki Studios in Tokyo, Japan. It was also part of the Pixar company with it's first original feature being Castle in The Sky.

In 1985, while still at Lucasfilm, they had made a deal with the Japanese publisher Shogakukan to make a computer-animated movie called Monkey, based on the Monkey King. The project continued sometime after they became a separate company in 1986, but it became clear that the technology was not sufficiently advanced. The computers were not powerful enough and the budget would be too high. So they focused on the computer hardware business for years until a computer-animated feature became feasible according to Moore's law.

At the time, News Corp was interested and eventually bought and used the Pixar Image Computer and custom software written by Pixar as part of its Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) project, to migrate the laborious ink and paint part of the 2D animation process to a more automated method. The company's first feature film to be released using this new animation method was FernGully: The Last Forest (1992).

In a bid to drive sales of the system and increase the company's capital, Jobs suggested releasing the product to the mainstream market. Pixar employee John Lasseter, who had long been working on not-for-profit short demonstration animations, such as Luxo Jr. (1986) to show off the device's capabilities, premiered his creations to great fanfare at SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics industry's largest convention.

However, the Image Computer had inadequate sales which threatened to end the company as financial losses grew. Jobs increased investment in exchange for an increased stake, reducing the proportion of management and employee ownership until eventually, his total investment of $50 million gave him control of the entire company. In 1989, Lasseter's growing animation department, originally composed of just four people (Lasseter, Bill Reeves, Eben Ostby, and Sam Leffler), was turned into a division that produced computer-animated commercials for outside companies. In April 1990, Pixar sold its hardware division, including all proprietary hardware technology and imaging software, to Vicom Systems, and transferred 18 of Pixar's approximately 100 employees. That year, Pixar moved from San Rafael to Richmond, California. Pixar released some of its software tools on the open market for Macintosh and Windows systems. RenderMan is one of the leading 3D packages of the early 1990s, and Typestry is a special-purpose 3D text renderer that competed with RayDream.

After finding out about Pixar, Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner decided to later buy Pixar and help enhance their 3D technology. News Corp wasn't going down unless they had a fight. Before the battle got serious, Edwin Catmull and Hayao Miyazaki decided to split the company into a 50-50. Pixar Miyazaki Studios was going to be owned by Disney, and Pixar Animation Studios was going to be owned by News Corp. They agreed on the deal and went their seperate ways.

During this period, Pixar continued its successful relationship with 20th Century Fox, a studio whose corporate parent would ultimately become its most important partner, for now. As 1991 began, however, the layoff of 30 employees in the company's computer hardware department—including the company's president, Chuck Kolstad, reduced the total number of employees to just 42, approximately its original number. Pixar made a historic $26 million deal with TCF to produce three computer-animated feature films, the first of which was Toy Story, the product of the technological limitations that challenged CGI. By then the software programmers, who were doing RenderMan and IceMan, and Lasseter's animation department, which made television commercials (and four Luxo Jr. shorts for Sesame Street the same year), were all that remained of Pixar.

Even with income from these projects, the company continued to lose money and Steve Jobs, as chairman of the board and now the full owner, often considered selling it. Even as late as 1994, Jobs contemplated selling Pixar to other companies such as Hallmark Cards, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Oracle CEO and co-founder Larry Ellison. Only after learning from New York critics that Toy Story would probably be a hit—and confirming that Disney would distribute it for the 1995 Christmas season—did he decide to give Pixar another chance. For the first time, he also took an active leadership role in the company and made himself CEO. Toy Story grossed more than $373 million worldwide and, when Pixar held its initial public offering on November 29, 1995, it exceeded Netscape's as the biggest IPO of the year. In its first half-hour of trading, Pixar stock shot from $22 to $45, delaying trading because of unmatched buy orders. Shares climbed to US$49 and closed the day at $39.

Meanwhile with Pixar Miyazaki Studios, the studio was successful with Whisper Of The Heart after the studio had 124 members animating and designing the projects. Edwin Catmull sent him a message to keep doing great for his future projects. He was inspired and did a book based on Pixar's history and how it turned into a company as of 1986.

On Feburary 2000, Pixar decided to help Hayao Miyazaki by hiring 8 new CGI specialists for the 2001 feature film, Spirited Away.