Pixar –

Pixar Animation Studios, pronounced /pɪksɑr/, is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio has earned 26 Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide. It is best known for its CGI-animated feature films created with Photorealistic Render Man, its own implementation of the industry-standard Render Man image-rendering application programming interface used to generate high-quality images. Pixar was founded in 1979 but at this time it was named as Graphics Group. Eventually, on February 3^rd in 1986 it became Pixar.

The Three founders of Pixar were:

 Ed Catmull

Alvy Ray Smith

Steve Jobs (incorporation as Pixar)

Pixar was founded as the Graphics Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucas film that was launched in 1979 with the hiring of Dr. Ed Catmull from the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), where he was in charge of the Computer Graphics Lab (CGL). At NYIT, the researchers had pioneered many of the CG techniques and worked on an experimental film called The Works. After moving to Lucas film, the team worked on creating the precursor to Render Man, called Motion Doctor, which allowed traditional cell animators to use computer animation with minimal training. Pixar merged with Lucasfilm in 1979, this is where it all began with Pixar as the Graphics Group, and this was before it was acquired by Apple by the co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986. Later after, The Walt Disney Company bought the company Pixar in 2006 which came up to a massive amount of $7.4 billion; this transaction made Steve Jobs the largest shareholder in Disney. Pixar has produced twelve feature films, beginning with Toy Story in 1995. It was followed by A Bug's Life in 1998, Toy Story 2 in 1999, Monsters, Inc. in 2001, Finding Nemo in 2003, The Incredibles in 2004, Cars in 2006, Ratatouille in 2007, WALL-E in 2008, Up in 2009, Toy Story 3 (to date, the highest-grossing animated film of all-time, grossing over $1 billion worldwide) in 2010, and Cars 2 in 2011. Eleven of the films have received critical and financial success, with the notable exception being Cars 2, which received substantially less praise than Pixar's previous films. The $602 million average gross of their films is by far the highest of any studio in the industry. These were all massive films in the public, which made Pixar very popular in the industry. Pixar was presented the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Biennale Venice Film Festival, which is a massive deal and was presented to the founder of Lucasfilm, George Lucas, on September 6^th 2009.