The Next Generation Pixar: How AI will Merge Film & Games

Stories are at the core of the human experience – we make sense of the world, find meaning, and connect with others through stories. Over the last century, many of our most beloved stories were enabled by technology shifts. In the 1930s, Disney invented the multiplane camera and was the first to create sound-synchronized, full color cartoons – eventually leading to the groundbreaking animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .

Marvel and DC Comics rose to prominence in the 1940s, dubbed the “golden age of comics,” enabled by the mass availability of the 4-color rotary letterpress and offset lithography for printing comics at scale. The technology’s limitations – low resolution, limited tonal range, dot based printing on cheap newsprint – created the iconic “pulp” look we still recognize today.

Similarly, Pixar was uniquely positioned in the 1980s to leverage a new technology platform – computers and 3D graphics. Cofounder Edwin Catmull was an early researcher in NYIT’s Computer Graphics Lab and Lucasfilm, pioneering foundational CGI concepts and later producing the first fully computer generated feature film Toy Story . Pixar’s storied graphical rendering suite, Renderman , has since been used in over 500 films to-date.

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