We didn’t get our start by animating ogre noises for kids.
There are so many types of CGI to contend with.
What was the first CGI movie?
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John Lasseter and Brad Bird are only the latest in a long line of visionaries.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
These points could be used to draw anything digitallya completely new notion at the time.
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In 1960, Whitney and his partner went into business officially under the brand Motion Graphics, Inc.
In 1958, Alfred Hitchcock made things official.
Vertigo’s opening sequence features some of the psychedelic stylings characteristic of Whitney’s early work.
These animations carry no real narrative content, though.
Many gloss over this one in favor of more thematically-relevant achievements in this area.
The year after, Steve Jobs acquired Pixar from Lucasfilm.
And in 1995, we finally had the world’s first feature-length CGI film, Toy Story.
Both of these scenes in Tron and Young Sherlock Holmes did, in fact, include live-action actors.
It depends on who you ask.
In 1973, Westworld used CGI to emulate a robot’s point of view.
Talk to the Hand
Westworld was succeeded by another film called Futureworld.
This time, however, the work of a few talented newcomers was invited into the fold.
One of these problems was rendering curved surfacesvital if one wishes to emulate real-life objects like human beings.
Still, audiences were stunned.
It was unlike anything that had ever been shown in theaters previously.
The hand’s cameo appearance in Futureworld was admittedly a minor one, but its legacy lives on.
We love this piece of history because it’s so meta.
The animation itself was created in 1972, which means that it actually predates some of these other accomplishments.
But they’ll always be number one in our hearts.
For comparison, that’s approximately 570 fewer than what a modern Pixar film requires.
These are industry-scale projects that unfold not over the course of months, but years.
