What is "pixar"

Pixar Animation Studios (Pixar) , is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. Pixar is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Luxo Jr., a character from the 1986 Disney/Pixar short film of the same name, is the studio's mascot.

Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder. Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion, a transaction that resulted in Jobs becoming Disney's largest single shareholder at the time.

Pixar is best known for CGI-animated feature films created with RenderMan, Pixar's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image- rendering application programming interface used to generate high-quality images.

Pixar has produced 17 feature films, beginning with Toy Story (1995), which was the first-ever computer-animated feature film, and its most recent being Finding Dory (2016). All 17 films have debuted with CinemaScore ratings of at least "A−," indicating positive receptions with audiences. The studio has also produced several short films. , its feature films have made over $10 billion worldwide, with an average worldwide gross of $622 million per film. Finding Dory, along with its predecessor Finding Nemo (2003), and two other films Toy Story 3 (2010) and Inside Out (2015), are among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time, with Toy Story 3 being the third all-time highest animated film with a gross of $1.063 billion, behind Walt Disney Animation Studios' Frozen (2013) and Illumination Entertainment's Minions (2015), which grossed $1.276 billion and $1.159 billion respectively in their initial releases . Fourteen of Pixar's films are also among the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time.

The studio has earned sixteen Academy Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, and eleven Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Most of Pixar's films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, since its inauguration in 2001, with eight winning; this includes Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3, and Inside Out, along with The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009), and Brave (2012). Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Cars (2006) are the only two films that were nominated for the award without winning it, while Cars 2 (2011), Monsters University (2013), and The Good Dinosaur (2015) are the only three not to be nominated. Up and Toy Story 3 were also the second and third animated films to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first being Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991).

On September 6, 2009, Pixar executives John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich were presented with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the biennial Venice Film Festival. This award was presented by Lucasfilm founder, George Lucas.