How Pixar Animation Evolved Over 28 Years | Movies Insider | Insider

Summary

The video traces how Pixar’s animation technology evolved from Toy Story (1995) through Luca (2021). Its central point is that technical innovations—from character rigs and cloth simulations to lighting and surface-detail tools—were developed to serve each film’s storytelling and artistic needs.

Character Movement and Rigs

• In Toy Story, Woody had 596 animation controls, or “avars.” By Toy Story 4, he had more than 7,000, allowing for much more nuanced movement and expression.
• Pixar’s Geppetto rigging system, later updated to Presto, let artists adapt and reuse character rigs rather than building each one from scratch. Rigs could also be repurposed creatively: for example, the sea lions in Finding Dory were built from dog rigs.
• For The Incredibles, Pixar developed the Goo system to show muscles and skin reacting to movement in real time. The characters’ rigs also supported exaggerated superhero movement.
• Pixar sometimes chose fewer controls to preserve a character’s distinctive movement. For Toy Story 3, animators deliberately restricted some of the toys’ range of motion.
• More demanding characters pushed simulation further. Hank’s hundreds of tentacle suckers in Finding Dory had to be simulated, and related technology helped animate Dante’s tongue in Coco and unusual stretchy characters in Soul.
• For Coco and Soul, Pixar used reference footage to animate musicians. In Soul, a digital piano rig could play from audio files, while hand and finger controls helped Joe convincingly perform. Joe had 1,266 controls in total, including 292 in each hand.
• Soul’s line-like Counselors required new tension controls and borrowed “ground locking” technology from Cars to make them slide naturally over surfaces.

Making Humans, Hair, and Crowds More Convincing

• Early Pixar humans were often kept in shadow or shown only in partial views because their models could look stiff. In Geri’s Game (1997), subdivision surfaces helped create smoother skin and were later used for many kinds of models.
• A RenderMan shader introduced for Toy Story 2 let artists add skin details such as pores, veins, and blemishes. Pixar also used subsurface scattering to make skin look less solid by simulating light passing through it.
• The Monsters, Inc. simulator FizT let clothes move separately from a character’s body and also supported fur. Later, The Incredibles required new hair simulation tools to handle Violet’s long hair and its collisions.
• For Brave, the Taz simulator helped Merida’s curly hair retain its shape while moving. Invisible core springs gave the curls more controlled motion.
• Pixar adapted human rigs for the skeletal characters in Coco, adding tools such as Kingpin to give bones a looser, more animated quality.
• Incredibles 2 brought improvements to character eyes and hair and used motion capture to make background crowds more varied. Motion capture also helped populate the carnival in Toy Story 4 with more distinct background actions.

Clothing Simulation and Detail

• Pixar began simulating cloth for Geri’s Game after a character’s suit behaved poorly when he moved. FizT later improved cloth motion, including Boo’s shirt in Monsters, Inc.
• In Onward, the father character is mostly clothing and stuffing rather than a conventional body. His upper half relied heavily on simulation, including volumetric simulation for its soft, squashy shape. Work on Hank in Finding Dory and layered clothing in Coco helped make this possible.
• Pixar’s clothing process also includes detailed design, virtual tailoring, and shading. Technology developed for Brave gave clothes richer fabric detail, while Incredibles 2 improved how suit textures held up when stretched or compressed.
• Artists added garment-specific wrinkles, scuffs, stains, and other imperfections to make costumes feel worn and believable. These details also supported characterization and storytelling.

Other Film-Specific Advances

• Finding Nemo: A new transparency shader reproduced the blurred, distorted view through a jellyfish’s membrane.
• Cars: Ray tracing created reflections and shadows on shiny vehicles. Ground locking helped cars follow uneven terrain without animators adjusting their position frame by frame.
• Ratatouille: Pixar studied food photography and combined subsurface scattering with a new “Gummy” lighting technique to make food look soft and translucent rather than hard or plastic.
• WALL-E: Pixar rebuilt its virtual camera to move with perspective and added intentional imperfections—such as slight bumps and delayed focus—to create a handheld or Steadicam-like feel.
• Up: A custom program simulated the movement and collisions of more than 10,000 balloons, beyond the capacity of Pixar’s existing simulator.
• Cars 2: The Tessendorf ocean generator created sharper, rougher waves than Pixar’s earlier water tools.
• Monsters University: Global illumination automated the way light travels through a scene, including its effects on shadows, reflections, and refractions. It became Pixar’s standard lighting system.
• Inside Out: Geometric area lights turned Joy into a moving light source, letting her glow affect nearby objects and characters.
• The Good Dinosaur: Volumetric clouds were built as three-dimensional forms from reusable “Cloud Lego” elements, so the camera could move through them.
• Cars 3: Bump roughness mapping preserved the appearance of scratches and other surface texture, even in distant shots.
• Toy Story 4: Pixar assigned antiques different levels of age and wear, allowing thousands of objects to have varied surface details.
• Luca: A transformation rig let animators adjust where and how quickly a character changed between sea-monster and human forms, with results visible during the process.

Overall, the video presents Pixar’s technology as a way to expand the range of believable movement, materials, and environments—and to give artists more direct control over how those elements support a story.

Main Speakers and Sources

The video is narrated by an Insider presenter and draws on interviews with Pixar animators, riggers, and technical staff. Named sources include Jared Fong, Mark Walsh, Jason Davies, Mara McMahon, Steve May, Claudia Chung, Lisa Forsell, Nicole Paradis Grindle, and Neil Helm. It also references observations or work by Pixar filmmakers including Pete Docter, Brad Bird, and Andrew Stanton.