Pixar pioneers behind Toy Story animation win 'Nobel Prize' of computing

In the opening scene of Toy Story, released in 1995, a cluster of boxes is scattered across a child's bedroom. The sun streams into the room as a Mr Potato Head doll demands money from a seemingly stricken cast of plastic and plush toys outside a cardboard bank.

Into the picture arrives the hero - a cowboy sheriff made of plastic and fabric with a pull-string to make him speak. The sheriff casts a shadow over the villainous potato who flees from the law.

It's a scene plucked from a child's imagination. It was also the culmination of decades of development in computer animation.

This year, two of the men behind those advancements, Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, are the recipients of the Turing Award. The award recognises "lasting and major" contributions to the field of computing and is considered to be the "Nobel Prize" of computer science.

The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery and comes with a $1m (£800,000) cash prize split between the winners.

Computer animation
Dr Catmull was one of the founders of Pixar, the studio behind Toy Story. Dr Hanrahan was one of Pixar's early employees.

The pair were notified of their win in early March.

It gave the two old friends and former colleagues just enough time to meet for a celebratory meal before coronavirus lockdown measures were put in place in California, where they both live.

"The digital revolution we have seen in all kinds of movies, television, games - probably no one made more of the difference to that then Ed and Pat," says David Price, author of the book The Pixar Touch.

To make Toy Story and other computer-animated films possible, Dr Catmull, Dr Hanrahan and their teams had to develop ways to get computers to visualise three-dimensional objects.

During his postdoctoral studies, Dr Catmull created a way to make a computer recognise a curved surface. Once developers had a mathematically defined curved surface they could begin to add more features to it - such as texture and depth.

"Step by step you figure out what kind of lighting should be applied. Then you begin to put in the physics of it, because plastic reflects light one way and metal reflects it in a very different way," Dr Catmull explains.

Dr Catmull had always had an interest in animation and film.

After earning his doctorate and working in a graphics lab in New York, he eventually became the head of computer division of Lucasfilm, founded by George Lucas. The creator of Star Wars and Jurassic Park saw the potential of computer animation in movies.

But Dr Catmull says his dream to make a feature-length computer-animated film was still seen as "wildly impractical".

"Most people dismissed the idea as an irrelevant pipe dream."

Pixar is born
In 1986, Apple founder Steve Jobs came along. He bought Lucasfilm's computer division and turned it into a standalone company, Pixar.

At first, the firm tried to sell computer hardware. When that failed to take off, Pixar refocused on computer imagery.