Every year or two, audiences can count on a well-crafted, richly imaginative family entertainment from Pixar Studios, but on November 19, 1995, betting on the company’s computer-animated films wasn’t such a sure thing. On that day, the company’s first feature, Toy Story, the debut movie from writer-director John Lasseter, premiered in Hollywood, and it was the end of a strange and sometimes bumpy road. Pixar had its origins in 1979 as a division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm devoted to the development of new software that would enable traditional animators to transition to 3D computer animation. Lucas sold the division for $5 million in 1986 to Steve Jobs, who had recently left Apple Computer, the company he founded (and would later return to). Under Jobs, Pixar shifted its focus towards building and selling a computer, the $135,000 Pixar Image Computer, mostly to non-film industry buyers like the U.S. government and medical research companies. But with sales slow, employee John Lasseter began to use the company’s technology to create TV commercials as well as a short film, Luxo Jr. The short, about father and son desk lamps, won an Academy Award in 1986 and lead to a three-picture deal with Walt Disney Studios. With that deal, Pixar firmly shifted its focus to moviemaking, and Lasseter began the screenplay that would become Toy Story. But soon, obstacles arose. Disney execs halted production on the film after 10 months, arguing that one of its characters, a toy cowboy named Woody, was too abrasive. Lassetter enrolled in a screenwriting course and, six months later, had retooled the script to Disney’s approval. All of the company’s work paid off on opening weekend when Toy Story opened to rapturous reviews and a box-office gross of $39.1 million, instantly recouping its $15 million production budget. And, ten years later, the company, that had created the best recognized animation brand since Disney, was bought by the Walt Disney Company itself for $7.4 billion in Disney stock.