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When the curtain rises on the Computer Animation Festival at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver (August 10-14), attendees will be treated to a celebration of the first computer-animated feature ever made. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Toy Story, and Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull is traveling to Canada to introduce the movie and share an insider’s view of how the milestone film came to be.
Catmull, one of SIGGRAPH’s most prominent pioneers, will also field audience questions and offer perspective on his 50 years attending the conference. “There are lots of rabbit holes I could go down,” he admits. But focusing on Toy Story, Pixar’s pioneering CG movie, will allow him to explore the digital transformation that made the film possible.
“As technology develops, it gets to a point that causes a change in the industry,” he observes. “Pixar signed a contract with Disney to make Toy Story in 1991, the year that Terminator 2 introduced the first major CG character. Then in ’93, Jurassic Park arrived, and Toy Story came out in ’95. In four years, the film industry solidified a digital transformation.”
A Giant Step Forward
Catmull recalls that Disney thought the movie, directed by John Lasseter and penned by Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and current Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter, was going to be a “boutique film.” He says, “They didn’t see how big it was going to be.” The SIGGRAPH community, however, wasn’t surprised. It had watched step by step as Pixar developed the tools and talent to produce Toy Story. They had witnessed CG’s evolution in the studio’s Electronic Theater shorts like Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy and attended countless technical presentations.
“In this community there’s a compounding of knowledge,” says Catmull. “We published everything we did, and SIGGRAPH became our intellectual home. We were sharing ideas with each other. There wasn’t any one breakthrough. It was building a body of ideas from many people. You build on what you’ve got, and if you do it right it can make a real difference.”
SIGGRAPH 2025 may be opening with a reminder of how far the CG field has come since the introduction of Woody and Buzz Lightyear, but this year’s Computer Animation Festival also offers a powerful glimpse of the future. Both the Best in Show Award and the Jury’s Choice Award have been won by students. France’s acclaimed school ESMA offers Trash, while ENSI delivers Jour de vent. When these two are considered along with The Mooning — the Best Student Film winner from Florida’s Ringling College — it’s clear there’s a youth movement invigorating SIGGRAPH this year.
Festival Chair Dawn Fidrick uses the word “stellar” to describe the student work chosen for this year’s Computer Animation Festival. Pointing to the faux-documentary style of The Mooning, Fidrick notes: “It’s hard to do comedy, and when it looks natural, you know you’ve got something special. The jury really responded to it.”
Fidrick, whose “day job” includes working at Double Negative in Vancouver on films like Dune 2, chose jury members that reflect the breadth of CG today. They are: ILM’s Martine Bertrand, Nexus Studio’s Fx Goby, Netflix’s Melissa Tierney, Atomic Cartoons’ Alyssa Zarate and writer/producer Vikram Chandra.
Fidrick, whose credits include producing Signs of Life for L.A.’s Griffith Observatory, made sure to pick jurors who were sophisticated in scientific visualization, choosing Dan Goods from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Vivian Trakinski from the American Museum of Natural History.
A Tech Deep Dive
The result of the jury’s deliberations was 43 selections, chosen from 406 submissions. “Each film submitted was viewed at least three times by three different viewers before going to the jury,” Fidrick explains.
Once the final jury selections were in hand, Fidrick worked to develop a coherent program of screenings for both the Electronic Theater (nicknamed the “nighttime show”) and three Animation Theater afternoon programs. She organized them around the themes of “Light Roast,” “Medium Roast” and “Dark Roast.” “Those words suggest the tone or mood of the content,” she explains.
The Light Roast sessions will feature a blend of student and professional work, such as scientific visualization pieces from NASA and Harvard Medical. These pieces take viewers from the world inside a bacterial molecule to distant stars captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
“The combination of art and science really captured the jury’s attention. It takes real datasets and implements them in a visually compelling piece that educates us.”
— SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Chair Dawn Fidrick on Perpetual Ocean 2
The shorts screened in the Medium Roast program will include student films, professional game cinematics and music videos. And true to SIGGRAPH’s tradition of showing projects that defy easy categorization, it is presenting Australian Andy Thomas’ Visual Bird Sounds, in which he animates “audio life-forms” from the Amazon. The Dark Roast program lineup, meanwhile, percolates with student films, reflecting the fearlessness of young artists tackling darker themes.
Fidrick emphasizes that these “lunchtime” screenings will take advantage of the latest presentation technology. “When our 2024 Chair John Kalagian brought back these Animation Theater screenings, they attracted packed houses. So, we’re bringing them to a larger space this year — 960 seats — and we’re using Christie digital cinema projectors. The Light, Medium and Dark Roast sessions will have the same spectacular presentation that the Electronic Theater gets.”
When the lights dim at the E.T. shows, SIGGRAPH audiences will see a broad spectrum of what CG animation can achieve. Along with the prizewinning student works Trash, Jour de vent and The Mooning, E.T. the Netflix/Skydance short Flink’s Pigeon Problems and DreamWorks’ Wednesdays With Gramps. The show will also spotlight game cinematics by Budapest’s Digic Pictures for Armored Core and Blizzard’s cinematic trailer for Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred.
SIGGRAPH has traditionally highlighted scientific visualization, and this year’s piece from NASA is a stunning example. In Perpetual Ocean 2, particle system animation represents swirling ocean currents with an artistry reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. As Fidrick notes, “This combination of art and science really captured the jury’s attention. It takes real datasets and implements them in a visually compelling piece that educates us.”
Genre-defying experimental animation frequently stands out in the Electronic Theater show, and holding the torch this year is Corpus and the Wandering, from Jo Roy and the National Film Board of Canada. Roy used an iPhone and crafted images 50,000 layers deep. “It didn’t have a traditional narrative,” says Fidrick. “We love it when SIGGRAPH shows us something we’ve never seen before.”
Longtime SIGGRAPH attendees might notice that E.T. isn’t the vehicle for studio compilation reels that it once was. At SIGGRAPH 2025, studios will instead promote their coolest images by doing deep-dive Production Sessions. Wētā FX will reveal how it achieved intense weather effects for The Last of Us, and Image Engine will explore its simulations for Dune: Prophecy. Meanwhile, Metaphysic, which is pushing the AI envelope to ‘de-age’ actors, will share the approach it used for last year’s Robert Zemeckis’ film Here.
To foster a give-and-take with audiences in the Computer Animation Festival, Fidrick says there will be preshows that present artists “In Conversation.” Director Alex Woo and his lead collaborators will offer a “first look” at the Netflix animated feature In Your Dreams. And fittingly, given SIGGRAPH 2025’s Vancouver locale, the National Film Board of Canada’s Inkwo for When the Starving Return will be discussed by director Amanda Strong. Fidrick describes Strong’s Indigenous film as “stop motion with a lot of CG. I don’t know if we’d call it ‘invisible CG,’ but we hope it will demystify how stop motion may be made.”
Giving audiences a glimpse behind the curtain is one of the things that SIGGRAPH does best, and having filmmakers “In Conversation” as part of the Computer Animation Festival seems like an apt complement to the opening Q&A with Ed Catmull. “Who will take the kind of risks that he took,” asks Dawn Fidrick. “Who will be the next visionary?”
For more information, visit 2025.siggraph.org.
