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Meanwhile, Lasseter’s short films, produced with the company’s own cutting-edge software, won some acclaim, including an Academy Award for Tin Toy (1988). Also that year it moved from San Rafael, California, to nearby Point Richmond. Pixar was slow to turn a profit, however, and in 1990 it sold its hardware operations. Initially, Jobs steered the company’s efforts toward marketing the Pixar Image Computer and developing high-tech graphics software. Catmull became president and CEO of the new company, called Pixar, and Jobs was installed as chairman of the board. With Lucas seeking to streamline his company, the computer division in 1986 was spun off as an independent business, the controlling interest of which was acquired by Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, then the head of the computer firm NeXT Inc. (The name “Pixar” was conceived as a faux-Spanish word meaning “to make pictures.”) By 1984 Lucasfilm had hired John Lasseter, who had worked as an animator at Disney, and he took advantage of the company’s technological strides to create short computer-animated films.

Aiming to improve graphics technology, the division developed the Pixar Image Computer, which, in its ability to render high-resolution three-dimensional colour images, offered applications beyond the film industry. In 1979 Catmull was hired by Lucasfilm Ltd., the California-based production company of filmmaker George Lucas, to lead its nascent computer division, and several of his NYIT colleagues followed him there. Pixar originated in the 1970s at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), where a team of computer scientists, including Ed Catmull, contributed to the emerging field of computer graphics. Its headquarters are located in Emeryville, California. Pixar’s feature-length releases, which consistently achieved worldwide commercial success, were lauded not only for their visual innovations but for their intelligent and emotional storytelling. Pixar Animation Studios, motion-picture studio, from 2006 a wholly owned subsidiary of the Disney Company, that was instrumental in the development and production of computer-animated films in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.