The celebration takes place on Sunday, August 10, starting at 12:30 at the Vancouver Convention Centre, kicking off this year’s conference with a nod to one of the most influential achievements in animation and computer graphics.
Pixar co-founder and CG pioneer Ed Catmull will headline the session with a keynote titled “To SIGGRAPH and Beyond,” offering personal reflections on the film’s development, the technical challenges behind it, and the vital role the SIGGRAPH community played in making it a reality. Pete Docter, now Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer, will share a special message about the original production, while longtime technical director Bill Reeves will revisit the pivotal moment when Toy Story was first previewed at SIGGRAPH in 1994.

But this tribute isn’t just about storytelling — it’s about the tech that made it possible. Toy Story was a technical milestone, built through Pixar’s long-standing collaborations with industry heavyweights like Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD. These partnerships have helped Pixar push the boundaries of rendering performance, GPU acceleration, and scalable production workflows. Pixar continues to work closely with Intel to optimize multi-core compute workloads in RenderMan. Its partnership with NVIDIA has been key to real-time GPU rendering and RTX-powered ray tracing in RenderMan XPU. Meanwhile, AMD continues to support Pixar’s hybrid pipelines, enabling real-time previews and high-performance rendering across platforms.

The session will also include a 4K theatrical screening of Toy Story, followed by trivia, audience giveaways, and a Q&A with key Pixar contributors. It’s designed to blend nostalgia with technical insight, celebrating a film that didn’t just tell a great story, but redefined the tools used to tell it.

SIGGRAPH 2025’s opening tribute won’t just look back, it will spotlight a legacy of innovation that still echoes through every render farm, GPU stack, and frame of animated storytelling today. With 30 years behind it, Toy Story is more than the film that started it all. It’s a landmark in digital cinema history — proof that pixels can carry emotion, that computer graphics can tell stories with soul, and that when bold creative vision meets cutting-edge technology, an entire industry can be transformed. For many in the industry, it is more than a nostalgic milestone, Toy Story stands as a blueprint for what happens when artists, engineers, and hardware innovators push beyond the limits of what's possible, or as Buzz Lightyear would say, “to infinity and beyond.”