Siggraph 2025 will open its conference this August by honouring Pixar’s Toy Story. A film that changed the course of animation, technology, and storytelling. It is the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film. The film will be celebrated in a special 30th anniversary event that captures the spirit of innovation, perseverance, and creativity that defines both the film and the Siggraph community.
The Siggraph Computer Animation Festival in partnership with ACM Siggraph pioneers, the tribute will be held on 10 August 2025, at the Vancouver Convention Centre. The celebration will begin at 12:30 pm PDT with a featured introduction by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull. In ‘Pioneers Featured Speaker: Catmull Story: To Siggraph and Beyond’, Catmull will share personal reflections on the breakthroughs, challenges, and triumphs that made Toy Story possible.
This will be followed by a talk and a live audience question and answer before a special 4K screening of Toy Story. Catmull explained that the technical hurdles to make the film were tremendous. Rendering realistic surfaces, modeling characters, and creating lifelike lighting were challenges no one had solved for feature-length storytelling. But Siggraph’s annual gathering of researchers and artists helped Pixar find answers. Innovations like new illumination models from Cornell, early ray tracing from the University of North Carolina, stochastic sampling methods developed at Lucasfilm, and advancements that led to the creation of Pixar’s RenderMan were all born from Siggraph papers and conversations.
“Siggraph wasn’t just a conference; it was our lifeline. We published everything we did because we believed in growing the field together. The breakthroughs shared openly at Siggraph on lighting, shading, rendering, they became the building blocks that we stitched together to make Toy Story,” said Catmull.
Toy Story supervising technical director Bill Reeves shared, “Showing work-in-progress footage at the conference was a milestone moment for us at Pixar. We didn’t know how it would be received. Everyone sat in silence as we waited for the footage to finish. When it ended, and the applause exploded in the room, it was a mind-blowing moment for us. We were in shock. We were excited. We knew we were on to something big. The audience at Siggraph that day gave us a much-needed boost of confidence.”
Pixar chief creative officer who served as a supervising animator on the film Pete Docter commented, “Looking back on making Toy Story, I realise now that none of us really knew what we were doing. At the time it didn’t feel that way the young, talented team was brimming with confidence and optimism, too inexperienced to seriously consider that the whole thing might fail. Maybe that was why it worked! Thirty years later, people around the world are still enjoying Toy Story and its sequels, shorts, and theme park attractions, so I guess we got something right!”
Siggraph 2025 Computer Animation Festival director Dawn Fidrick said, “Toy Story‘s place in history is a remarkable milestone for computer graphics. It showed CG wasn’t just about producing images — it proved CG images could create the illusion of life, emotion, and storytelling. It paved the way for everything that followed.”
The 30th anniversary tribute will not only look back on the film’s legacy but also spotlight its enduring influence. The modern CG animation pipeline, still rooted in the innovations pioneered for Toy Story, has since fueled countless advancements in visual storytelling.
Siggraph tribute to Toy Story is more than a celebration of the past. It is a call to the next generation of dreamers and pioneers: to keep pushing, collaborating, and telling stories that change the world.
