Quick-draw artists

Pixar - the iconic animation company that produced Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo - is marking its 20th anniversary. But can digital cartoons ever have the same charm as hand-drawn characters?

Let there be light. Well, an anglepoise lamp to be precise. It's 20 years since Pixar, the mega-billion animation company, launched its first movie - a short film about a lamp with a life of its own, called Luxo Jr.

Along with iconic brands such as Google and the iPod, Pixar's computer-generated movies have become part of the digital era - with the animation firm becoming one of Hollywood's biggest players.

Marking its 20th anniversary is an exhibition at the Science Museum in London, which displays the art and the craft behind Toy Story, Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles and the soon-to-be released, Cars.

This is a world of movies where the images are instantly-recognisable, but there are no stars. If anyone was going to walk down a red carpet, it would have to be an anonymous army of artists, directors and software designers.

Or maybe it would be the industrial-scale "renderfarms" that provide the processing power for the computer-generated animations.

Digital Disney

Pixar's big success wasn't instant. For the first decade the company had made its living from advertising, producing animations for products such as Listerine and Kellogg's All Bran.


Finding Nemo: Pixar has grown from small fry to movie monster

But the big breakthrough came in 1995 with its first full-length movie - Toy Story. This first ever fully computer-animated feature film was the biggest grossing movie of the year - earning $362m (£208m) worldwide.

Appropriately for an animation company, Pixar had impeccable timing.

Toy Story was launched when new computer power was convincing audiences that they should become more techno-friendly.

Just as Disney created the animations for the great age of cinema, Pixar has produced some of the iconic animations of the digital age.

The movies that followed were all runaway successes. Monsters Inc reached the $100m box office benchmark quicker than any animated film in history.

But Pixar also discovered a goldmine in another side of the digital market - the arrival of DVDs - a format which showed off its crystal-clear animation to full effect. Finding Nemo shifted eight million copies on its first day of release.

Artists not anoraks

The exhibition shows how much work is involved - with a single movie requiring the efforts of 230 people and a whole load of supercomputers for four years.


Pixar movies have turned DVDs into a digital goldmine

But not everyone is convinced that the quality of computer-generated animation matches hand-drawn films.

Richard Taylor, former head of animation at the Royal College of Art, says such films might be lucrative, but "something is filtered out" in the process.

"Computer animation has less direct appeal, less charm, it's less humane - it lacks the roughness that nature gives."

But Pixar's creative boss, John Lasseter, says: "Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist."

And the exhibition shows the creative perspiration involved. Before the computer animation process, artists will draw and paint up to 50,000 storyboards - and the exhibition includes examples of the so-called "colourscripts" which set the visual style and tone of the story.