History of Pixar Animated Films: From Toy Story to Today

Introduction

The history of Pixar animated films starts with a puzzle. In November 1995, audiences sat down to watch a feature film in which every frame had been built inside a computer, and they left talking not about the technology but about a jealous cowboy doll and a space ranger who did not know he was a toy. That gap between how the film was made and how it felt is the thread that runs through the whole Pixar story, from a computer division inside Lucasfilm to a studio whose films now anchor family viewing around the world.

This article traces that story in order: the Lucasfilm years, the short films that taught a team of engineers how to act with light, the breakthrough of Toy Story, the complete feature filmography in release order, the Disney acquisition of 2006, and the streaming era of the 2020s. The filmography is current to October 2026, and titles that have been announced but are not recorded as released by Pixar are identified as upcoming rather than counted as released films.

Before Pixar: A Computer Division Inside Lucasfilm, 1979 to 1986

Pixar’s own published history begins in 1979, when George Lucas recruited Ed Catmull from the New York Institute of Technology to head Lucasfilm’s Computer Division, charged with developing computer technology for the film industry. Lucas’s wish list, as Pixar records it, included digital film and sound editing systems, a laser film printer, and further exploration of computer graphics. Alvy Ray Smith joined the following year as Director of Computer Graphics Research.

The division’s Graphics Group soon produced work that reached cinema screens. In 1982 to 1983, the Computer Division completed the Genesis Effect sequence for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which Pixar describes as the first completely computer animated sequence in a feature film. The group also created its first film-resolution image, The Road to Point Reyes, and completed the Stained Glass Knight sequence in Young Sherlock Holmes.

The decisive hire was an animator, not an engineer. John Lasseter, who had worked in traditional animation, was invited to do freelance work with the Graphics Group near the end of 1983 and was hired full-time in 1984 as an interface designer. That same year, a partially completed version of The Adventures of André & Wally B. premiered at SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics conference. Pixar calls it the first short film created by the future animation studio, featuring complex flexible characters, hand-painted textures, and motion blur, and the first example of character animation in the young medium of computer animation. The distinction matters. Effects work proved computers could build images. André & Wally B. was an early proof that a computer-built character could perform, however briefly.

1986: Jobs Buys the Group, and Pixar Becomes a Company

In 1986, Steve Jobs purchased the Computer Division from George Lucas and established the group as an independent company named Pixar, employing about 40 people at the time. The new company was not yet a film studio in the modern sense. Pixar’s own timeline records that it sold and developed technology, including the Pixar Image Computer, which the Computer Division had shown in prototype form at SIGGRAPH, and that Pixar and Disney began collaborating in 1986 on CAPS, the Computer Animation Production System for traditional animated films. The first check written to Pixar by a client after its incorporation was from Disney, for work on CAPS.

Animation continued alongside the technology business, and it is the animation that built the studio’s future. Luxo Jr. was completed in 1986. The short, John Lasseter’s official directorial debut, was unveiled in August at SIGGRAPH and screened for general audiences in Los Angeles area theaters in November. Its two desk lamps, one large and one small, have no faces and no dialogue, yet their body language reads instantly as parent and child. Disney’s own history of the period calls Luxo Jr. a defining statement of Pixar’s creative philosophy and notes that its lamp became the studio’s logo. A company that made its name with a hopping lamp was announcing, early, that character would come before spectacle.

The Short Films Were the Research Department, 1987 to 1991

Pixar’s short films of the late 1980s were small in length and large in consequence, because each one solved a problem the studio would later face at feature scale. Red’s Dream was completed in 1987 to 1988, and a portion of it was rendered entirely on the Pixar Image Computer. In the same period, Pixar’s proprietary animation system, known internally as Menv, came online, and its renderer, RenderMan, made its internal debut. The first commercial version of RenderMan was released in 1989, the year Pixar also began making commercials, starting with an advertisement for Tropicana orange juice directed by Lasseter. Pixar records that the commercial work gave the company experience in pitching, storytelling, and working with clients, and allowed it to develop and refine its production pipeline.

Tin Toy, Pixar’s third short film, was produced using Menv and RenderMan. A partially completed version screened at SIGGRAPH in 1988, and the finished film premiered later that year at the Ottawa International Film Festival. Tin Toy went on to become the first computer animated film to receive an Academy Award, when it was named Best Short Film (Animated) the following year. Disney’s history makes the same point in slightly different words, calling Tin Toy the first computer-animated short to win an Academy Award. Knick Knack followed in 1989, Pixar’s first animation produced in stereoscopic 3D.

Read together, the shorts explain the feature that followed. A studio that had learned to make a wind-up toy express fear in Tin Toy, and a lamp express affection in Luxo Jr., had already rehearsed the central skill of Toy Story: making familiar objects carry feelings audiences had not expected objects to have.

1991 to 1995: The Disney Agreement and the Making of Toy Story

In 1991, Disney and Pixar announced an agreement to make and distribute at least one computer-generated animated movie, and Pixar began work on the project that became Toy Story. Two hires from this period shaped the next three decades: Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter had joined the company in 1990 to 1991, each animating a commercial before moving toward feature work.

Toy Story, directed by John Lasseter, was released in theaters on November 22, 1995. Pixar calls it the world’s first computer animated feature film, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences describes it the same way, as the first computer-animated feature film and the debut feature release from Pixar Animation Studios, released by Walt Disney Pictures. The premise is now familiar: Woody, a pull-string cowboy doll, is the favorite toy of a boy named Andy, until a new space ranger figure, Buzz Lightyear, arrives and refuses to accept that he is a toy at all. The Academy summary notes that the film introduced Woody and Buzz as a heroic pair whose adventures led to acclaimed sequels, television specials, short films, and theme park attractions.

The response confirmed that the experiment had worked. Pixar records that Toy Story opened at number one and became the highest grossing film of the year, making $192 million domestically and $362 million worldwide on its original run. The Academy gave the film three Oscar nominations, for Best Original Song, Best Original Score, and Best Original Screenplay, which Pixar notes was the first time an animated film was recognized for screenwriting. Lasseter received a Special Achievement Oscar for his inspired leadership of the Pixar Toy Story Team resulting in the first feature-length computer animated film. Any later Disney summary giving a higher worldwide total is counting later reissues as well; this article uses Pixar’s original run figures throughout.

Pixar Films in Order: The Complete Released Filmography to October 2026

The table below lists every Pixar feature film recorded as released in Pixar’s own studio history, in release order, with the United States release date or release window Pixar gives for each title. It contains 31 films, from Toy Story in 1995 to Toy Story 5 in 2026. Any title not recorded as released by Pixar is not counted in the 31.

Three reading notes help make sense of the list. First, there is no Pixar feature for 2000, 2002, 2005, or 2014 in Pixar’s timeline, which reflects a studio that released roughly one film a year and sometimes none. Second, 2015 and 2017 brought two Pixar features each, Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur, then Cars 3 and Coco. Third, the release pattern changes in 2020: Soul, Luca, and Turning Red reached audiences first on Disney+ rather than in theaters, a shift examined below.

The First Decade of Features, 1995 to 2009

The striking feature of Pixar’s first decade is how rarely the studio repeated itself. A Bug’s Life in 1998 took the insect world as its setting. Toy Story 2 in 1999, which Pixar notes was the first film in history to be entirely created, mastered, and exhibited digitally, deepened the first film’s questions about what a toy is for when its child grows up. Monsters, Inc. in 2001 built a city powered by children’s screams, and Finding Nemo in 2003 followed a clownfish father searching the ocean for his son. Disney’s history notes that both Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, the 2004 story of a superhero family in suburban retirement, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Cars arrived in June 2006, the same year as the Disney acquisition described below. Ratatouille followed in 2007, built around a rat who wants to cook in Paris. WALL-E in 2008 trusted visual storytelling to an unusual degree, following a small waste-collecting robot on an abandoned Earth through long passages carried by movement, sound, and expression rather than dialogue. Up in 2009 became the first animated feature film to open the Cannes Film Festival, according to Pixar, and its opening passage, which covers a marriage in compressed, largely wordless form, is the sequence most often cited when viewers explain why they take Pixar seriously as filmmaking. That reputation is an interpretation, not a statistic, but the festival and Academy record underneath it is documented in the Sources.

The Disney Acquisition, 2006

Disney and Pixar had worked together since the CAPS collaboration of 1986 and the feature agreement of 1991, under which Disney distributed Toy Story and the films that followed, and a 1997 agreement to jointly produce five movies over ten years. On January 24, 2006, Disney announced that it had agreed to acquire Pixar in an all-stock transaction. Under the agreement, 2.3 Disney shares would be issued for each Pixar share, and based on Pixar’s fully diluted shares outstanding, the transaction value was $7.4 billion, or $6.3 billion net of Pixar’s cash of just over $1 billion. Disney’s press release set out the leadership settlement at the same time: Pixar president Ed Catmull would serve as president of the combined Pixar and Disney animation studios, John Lasseter would be chief creative officer of the animation studios, and Pixar chairman and chief executive Steve Jobs would be appointed to Disney’s board of directors. Both animation units were to retain their current operations and locations.

The acquisition matters to the filmography for a practical reason. Before 2006, Pixar was an independent company whose films Disney distributed under contract, and the final film under the 1997 co-production agreement was Cars. After 2006, Pixar was a Disney subsidiary, and every later title in the table above is a Disney release of a Pixar production in ownership as well as in distribution.

The 2010s: Sequels, Originals, and a Leadership Change

Toy Story 3 opened the decade in June 2010, returning to Andy’s toys as Andy himself prepared to leave for college. Cars 2 followed in 2011, the year Pixar celebrated its 25th anniversary. Brave in 2012 centered on the Scottish princess Merida and marked a technical handover as well: Pixar records that Brave was the first film animated using its new proprietary system, Presto, which replaced the long-lived Menv system dating to the Tin Toy era. Monsters University in 2013 returned to the Monsters, Inc. characters as students.

Inside Out in 2015, which premiered at the 68th Cannes Film Festival, placed its story inside the mind of an eleven-year-old girl, with emotions as characters. The Good Dinosaur followed in November 2015. Finding Dory in 2016 was accompanied by Piper, which Pixar records won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film. Cars 3 and Coco arrived in 2017. Coco premiered on October 20, 2017, at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico, and Pixar records that it went on to become, at that time, Mexico’s number one highest grossing film of all time.

Incredibles 2, released in the United States on June 15, 2018, set the record for best debut for an animated film of all time at that point, according to Pixar, and eventually grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide, which Pixar describes as its biggest grossing film yet at that time. It was accompanied by Bao, written and directed by Domee Shi, which won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film. On June 19, 2018, Pete Docter was officially announced as Pixar’s chief creative officer, the role he still holds in Disney’s recent account. Toy Story 4 closed the decade’s feature list in June 2019. Ed Catmull, identified by Pixar as an original co-founder, retired as president of Pixar at the end of July 2019.

The 2020s: A Pandemic, a Streaming Chapter, and a Theatrical Return

Onward, directed by Dan Scanlon, was released in theaters on March 6, 2020, days before the pandemic disrupted cinema attendance worldwide. Pixar’s timeline gives a precise glimpse of that disruption: on March 16, 2020, with approximately seven weeks of production remaining on Soul, Pixar employees began working from home, and Soul was completed the following month. Soul, directed by Pete Docter and co-directed by Kemp Powers, was released on Disney+ on December 25, 2020, rather than receiving a theatrical release. It went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards.

Luca, directed by Enrico Casarosa, followed the same path, released on Disney+ on June 18, 2021, and Turning Red, directed by Domee Shi, premiered on Disney+ on March 11, 2022. Three consecutive Pixar features therefore reached most viewers first on a television or laptop screen. Lightyear, directed by Angus MacLane and presented by Pixar as the story of the hero who inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy, returned the studio to theaters in June 2022. Elemental, directed by Peter Sohn, was released in theaters worldwide on June 16, 2023. Inside Out 2 opened in theaters on June 14, 2024, and Pixar records that it became the highest grossing animated film of all time and the highest grossing film of 2024. That is Pixar’s characterization of the result, reported here with that attribution, and it superseded the studio’s earlier description of Incredibles 2 as its biggest grossing film.

Elio, released in theaters on June 20, 2025, and directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina, was Pixar’s latest released feature at the end of 2025. Pixar describes it as a cosmic misadventure about a space fanatic who is accidentally beamed into space. Two further features followed in 2026 and are included in the released filmography above: Hoppers, released in theaters on March 6, 2026, became the studio’s 30th feature, and Toy Story 5, released in theaters in June 2026, became its 31st and is the latest released feature as of the October 2026 cutoff for this article. Announced release dates for future titles can and do change, and readers should treat any such title as upcoming until Pixar records its release.

The 2020s also brought Pixar further into series work alongside features, including the limited series Dream Productions in December 2024 and Win or Lose, described by Pixar as its first original long-form animated series, released on Disney+ on February 19, 2025. Neither is a feature film, and neither is counted in the filmography table.

What Makes a Pixar Film Feel Like a Pixar Film

Viewers and critics describing Pixar’s house style usually point to the same recurring habits, and this section is offered as a reading of the filmography rather than as a set of verified production facts. The first habit is the premise built on a simple question: what if toys had a secret life, what if monsters needed children’s screams for power, what if emotions ran a control room inside a child’s head. The second is emotional directness aimed at every age at once, so that a film such as Up or Inside Out can be followed by a child and felt differently by the adult beside them. The third is a willingness to let images carry meaning, most visibly in WALL-E and in the opening of Up, where long passages play with little or no dialogue.

The fourth habit is structural restlessness. Pixar’s timeline shows a studio that kept changing its own tools, from Menv to Presto, and from theatrical exclusivity to streaming premieres and back. The consistency is not a formula so much as a bet, repeated across 31 films, that audiences will follow an unusual premise if the characters inside it behave in emotionally recognizable ways. Where individual films have divided audiences, the disagreement has usually been about whether a story earned its ending, not about the craft of the animation. That judgment is this article’s assessment, and readers working through the filmography in order can test it title by title.

How to Watch Pixar Films in Order

Release order, using the table above, is the most instructive way to watch, because it shows the technology and the storytelling developing together. Toy Story looks simple beside Inside Out 2, and that contrast is the point: the early films solved character and story with limited tools, and the later films inherited both the tools and the expectations.

For a shorter introduction, five films cover the studio’s range: Toy Story for the founding premise, Finding Nemo for the quest story at full confidence, WALL-E for visual storytelling, Inside Out for the interior story told literally, and Coco for a story rooted in family memory and a specific cultural celebration. For younger children, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and Luca are the gentlest entry points. Availability varies by country and service, so check the catalog available to you rather than assuming any title is streaming in your region.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Pixar founded?

Pixar became an independent company in 1986, when Steve Jobs purchased the Computer Division from George Lucas and established the group as Pixar. Its roots are older: Pixar’s history begins in 1979, when Lucas recruited Ed Catmull to head Lucasfilm’s Computer Division, whose Graphics Group did the work that led to Pixar.

What was the first Pixar movie?

Toy Story, released in theaters on November 22, 1995. Pixar calls it the world’s first computer animated feature film, and the Academy describes it as the first computer-animated feature film and Pixar’s debut feature release. Pixar had made short films for a decade before it, beginning with The Adventures of André & Wally B. in 1984 while the team was still at Lucasfilm, and Luxo Jr. in 1986 as Pixar itself.

How many Pixar movies are there?

Thirty-one feature films are recorded as released in Pixar’s published record, from Toy Story in 1995 to Toy Story 5 in 2026, and all 31 are listed in order in the filmography table in this article. The two most recent are Hoppers, released in March 2026, and Toy Story 5, released in June 2026. Titles not recorded as released by Pixar are not counted, as of the October 2026 cutoff.

When did Disney buy Pixar, and for how much?

Disney announced on January 24, 2006, that it had agreed to acquire Pixar in an all-stock transaction. The transaction value was $7.4 billion, based on Pixar’s fully diluted shares outstanding, or $6.3 billion net of Pixar’s cash of just over $1 billion, with 2.3 Disney shares issued for each Pixar share. Disney and Pixar had already worked together for about fifteen years, since the feature agreement of 1991 that produced Toy Story.

What is Luxo Jr., and why is a lamp in the Pixar logo?

Luxo Jr. is a short film completed in 1986, John Lasseter’s official directorial debut, unveiled at SIGGRAPH that August. It features a small desk lamp and a larger lamp, and Disney’s history calls it a defining statement of Pixar’s creative philosophy and notes the lamp logo that came from it. The short showed that simple computer-animated forms, animated with clear body language, could convey personality and emotion.

Which Pixar film has made the most money?

Pixar’s published history describes Inside Out 2, released in theaters on June 14, 2024, as the highest grossing animated film of all time and the highest grossing film of 2024. Earlier, the same history described Incredibles 2 in 2018 as grossing over $1.2 billion worldwide and as Pixar’s biggest grossing film yet at that time. Both descriptions are reported here with their dates, because the record changed.

Did Soul, Luca, and Turning Red play in theaters?

Pixar’s published history records all three as Disney+ releases: Soul on December 25, 2020, Luca on June 18, 2021, and Turning Red premiering on Disney+ on March 11, 2022. They were the studio’s pandemic era features, made while Pixar staff were at one point completing Soul from home. Lightyear returned Pixar features to theaters in June 2022, and every feature since, Elemental, Inside Out 2, Elio, Hoppers, and Toy Story 5, is recorded by Pixar as a theatrical release.

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