Tin Toy

Tin Toy is a 1988 American animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short film, which runs for five minutes, stars Tinny, a tin one-man band toy, trying to escape from Billy, a human baby. The third short film produced by the company's small animation division, it was a risky investment: due to the low revenue produced by Pixar's main product, the Pixar Image Computer, the company was under financial constraints.

Lasseter pitched the concept for Tin Toy by storyboard to Pixar owner Steve Jobs, who agreed to finance the short despite the company's struggles, which he kept alive with annual investment. The film was officially a test of the PhotoRealistic RenderMan software and proved new challenges to the animation team, namely the difficult task of realistically animating Billy. Tin Toy later gained attention from Disney, who sealed an agreement to create Toy Story starring Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, which was primarily inspired by elements from Tin Toy.

The short film debuted in a completed edit at the SIGGRAPH convention in August 1988 to a standing ovation from scientists and engineers. The film went on to claim Pixar's first Academy Award with the 1988 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, becoming the first animated film made using computer-generated imagery to win an Academy Award. With the award, Tin Toy went far to establish computer animation as a legitimate artistic medium outside SIGGRAPH and the animation-festival film circuit. In 2003, Tin Toy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".