According to Mr Ed Catmull, president of movie studio Pixar, the turning point was in 1991. That was the year that the two biggest hits at the cinema relied heavily on eye-popping computer graphics - Terminator II and, in a computer-rendered ballroom scene, Walt Disney's hand-drawn feature Beauty and the Beast.
Audiences appeared ready for the first full-length computer animated film, and Disney agreed to fund a movie based on Pixar's Oscar-winning short, Tin Toys. Four years of hard graft later, Toy Story was released and its performance took everyone, including toy-makers, by surprise. Only the luckiest kids got Buzz Lightyear dolls that Christmas. "It was totally beyond anything we ever thought. In most people's minds, including Disney's, this was just the starter film," Mr Catmull recalls.
In a business where there is no such thing as a sure-fire hit, Pixar has since proven remarkably reliable. Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life and Monsters Inc have grossed a combined $1.7 billion worldwide.
Now comes Finding Nemo, the adventures of an unfunny clown-fish in search of his lost son. The film has darted nimbly through the flotsam and jetsam of vapid sequels in the US this summer to become the biggest animated film of all time. At the American box office alone, Finding Nemo has taken $336.5 million, overtaking Disney favourite The Lion King.
A sharply witty film, Finding Nemo has also won critical acclaim - the US media are even talking about Oscars. It opened across Britain yesterday.
For Mr Catmull (58), a co-founder of Pixar and the technical brains behind the business, the success of Finding Nemo is the stunning realisation of a long-held dream. The bearded studio boss, who looks as though he might be more at home in the company of Bill Gates than in Hollywood, first had the idea of producing a feature film using computer graphics in the mid-1970s.
At school, Mr Catmull had hoped to become an animator, inspired by the Disney movies Peter Pan and Pinocchio. Deciding that he wasn't good enough, he instead enrolled in a degree course in the nascent field of computer science at the University of Utah, where he stumbled into graphics.
That same year produced other notable alumni, including Mr Jim Clark (the founder of Netscape) and Mr John Warnock who founded Adobe. "I thought it would probably take 10 years to get to the point where we could really use computer graphics in movies," he says. "The reality is it took more like 20 years."
Disney, which has co-funded and distributed all five of the Pixar movies, is thankful for the direction his career took - its recent, traditionally animated features, notably Treasure Planet and Atlantis, have flopped miserably.
The diverging fate of Pixar's computer-generated films and Disney's hand-drawn efforts has even prompted speculation that the traditional art form is dead. JMr effrey Katzenberg at rival DreamWorks, smarting from the failure of his studio's latest effort, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, said recently that he would no longer produce hand-drawn movies. The announcement was significant. It was Mr Katzenberg who had given the Disney studio new life during the 1980s with films like The Lion King.
It is an assessment that causes Mr Catmull to bristle. Pixar, he says, is a continuing part of a grand tradition of American animation, not its death-knell.
"For me, one of the great tragedies is the conclusion studios have drawn about traditional animation. I believe that 2D animation could be just as vital as it ever was. I think the problem has been with the stories. If you see a bad live-action film, what are the conclusions you draw?
"Typically, it is that they made a bunch of mistakes, a bad script, wrong casting. You get into 2D and you get a few films that are not strong films. And what is the conclusion? That it's 2D? I beg to differ. It's a convenient excuse but it's just wrong," Mr Catmull says.
The company floated on Wall Street shortly after the release of Toy Story and the shares have gone from $22 to $71. Steve Jobs pumped in another $50 million along the way, but the investment has paid off. He still owns 55 per cent of the business, a stake worth around $2.2 billion.
The company is working on several new projects. Next up is The Incredibles - the story of a band of undercover superheroes in suburbia. Then comes Cars - a classic road movie - and Ratatouille, about a rat who lives in a posh restaurant.
The success of Finding Nemo has strengthened Pixar's hand in talks with Disney to renegotiate its distribution deal. Under the existing arrangement, the companies share profits after Disney has taken a 12.5 per cent cut. Pixar has also been talking to rival studios. Last year, Pixar made $90 million but could earn far more. The company is debt-free and has $500 million in the bank.
"We're talking with Disney. If it doesn't work out, we have other alternatives," Catmull says. "But we've had a great relationship with Disney." - (Guardian Service)
