Researching Pixar writeup.

Pixar has been a company that in modern times has been very well known, they have made very popular films both interdependently and working alongside Disney. they created the first ever feature length film that was fully animated, toy story, this film was a massive success because of how original it was, and didn't focus on the fact it was animated, it has a story and very good characters behind the strength of the film. the team that created the toy story film saw the movie TRON in 1982 and they wanted to recreate the style in a way in their film. they had many other shorter films that were well received. one of them 'Tin Toy' helped inspire toy story, for obvious reasons.

pixar needed to keep themselves afloat as a company so they started creating fully animated TV adverts, here's an example of one below.

the adverts were made on a yearly basis and were pretty important to how the company and teams developed as workforce and made their style what it is today.

Buzz lightyear, the star of the toy story films was originally called Lunar Larry, but they decided to change the name to something more interesting, buzz was supposed to be the toy that any and every kid would want, so they combined the best features of toys that the teams had laying around into a model and idea for buzz.
they also researched all kinds of toys and used how it was made etc to make its personality.
to do the animation for the green army men, the team would nail some boots to a plank of wood and walk (or waddle) around the office to get a good idea of how they moved.
to make the more organic models in the animations like faces the team would use clay models and make them by hand and they scan them into the computer to give them a more handmade and natural feel.
during the making of toy story the team spent 3 years storyboarding the film, scrapping it, and re-doing it over and over again.the team also tried everything in the film, in real life, the burning of the doll was tried in real life to see how a doll would actually react, they they used this as reference for the actual film.

the pixar building in California has a large atrium that causes people to have one central location to talk and makes it a very good creative place to work, steve jobs actually designed the building with one bathroom so that people had to walk past eachother in the hallways, this was scrapped as being slightly insane but the idea of one unified work force still strikes home.
people got to design their own offices completely, for example one of the technicians wanted an airplane fuselage that was full of jungle brush, and that's what he got, others wanted western saloons and tiki tents and anything else to make them comfortable and happy and make them work as well as possible.
in the credits for their films they literally have everyone in the studio, even people that work as accountants because they're all in it together and that's what makes pixar a very different company.

pixar use RenderMan, a software that they made themselves to promote creativity and having full control what they want a thing on screen to do and how realistic they could make it, The software consists of a series of sliders that can move parts of a character like having hundreds of strings attached to them at once, giving the teams working on the animation much better of an idea how something was due to turn out.