“This was the holy grail of computer graphics: to get to the point where you could do a feature film,” “Toy Story” executive producer Ed Catmull recalls in one of the bonus features on the movie’s 10th Anniversary Edition DVD. As we explain in the “An Image of Walt” sidebar for our article about UP: The Video Game, director John Lasseter was inspired by seeing the computer animation being created for the 1982 movie “Tron.”

Of course, Lasseter understood that computer graphics were simply “new tools within the medium of animation,” as he explains during the same DVD bonus feature. “When we first started working with it and making short films, the most important thing to every one of my films was story and the characters. That drove everything.” Pixar’s early short films, which the company continues to make today, provided the research and development necessary to undertake something as ambitious as “Toy Story.”

Early Success and Failure

The studio’s first short film, “Tin Toy,” gave Lasseter and crew the concept of toys that were alive. (Pixar’s second, “Luxo Jr.,” gave the company its distinctive desk lamp mascot.) The main character from “Tin Toy,” a mechanical one-man band named Tinny, found his way into the initial draft of “Toy Story,” in which he was paired with a ventriloquist dummy. The two ended up in a daycare, an idea that was resurrected for “Toy Story 3.”

The setting then became a child’s room, but Lasseter decided that Tinny was too antiquated to be considered a contemporary boy’s favorite toy, so Tinny morphed into a space character who was called Lunar Larry, among other monikers. Eventually he acquired the name Buzz Lightyear, in homage to astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The ventriloquist dummy became a cowboy named after movie actor Woody Strode.

Like many of Pixar’s films, “Toy Story” drew on a familiar storytelling device that was then hidden beneath a unique narrative — in this case, it was a buddy movie. (Look for the parallels between “A Bug’s Life” and “Seven Samurai” for another example of that.) Pixar even sold actor Tom Hanks on “Toy Story” by overlaying the dialogue from a buddy film of his — “Turner & Hooch” — on top of some test animation. “I saw Woody and he talked like I did, so it all made perfect sense,” Hanks recalls.

However, despite three years of work, the first version of “Toy Story,” with rough storyboards and dialogue recorded by the animators, was rejected by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who at the time was in charge of the motion picture division at Disney. (Pixar had inked a distribution deal with Disney.) Undaunted, the Pixar team started over.

Lasseter recalls in the documentary “The Pixar Story”: “We turned the [new story] reels around in two or three weeks, an unheard-of amount of time, and we showed it to Disney — they were all ready to completely shut production down and call it a day — and it was good. It wasn’t great, but it was good, and it showed the potential of what ‘Toy Story’ could be. They said ‘Okay,’ and we started production back up and went from there.”

Triumphant

“Toy Story” was released to theaters in November 1995. It grossed more than $190 million in the United States, making it the top film of the year, and it was nominated for three Academy Awards, with Lasseter receiving a special Oscar in recognition of his pioneering efforts on the first full-length computer-animated film. Work on a sequel began immediately, concurrent with development of Pixar’s next theatrical release, “A Bug’s Life” (1998).

“Toy Story 2” was initially slated as a direct-to-video release, in the tradition of Disney’s other animated sequels, but the studio changed its mind after seeing early work on the film. In a reversal of what originally happened to “Toy Story,” however, it was Pixar that felt the project was not ready. Lasseter had not been involved with the sequel from the beginning, but he stepped in and reworked the story, despite Disney’s insistence that Pixar didn’t have enough time to meet the planned release date.

During “The Pixar Story,” animator Joe Ranft explains how the team approached that frantic development schedule: “You’re trying to find what you hope the audience would feel when they’re watching this movie. Every other department is on board to use the environment, the color, the lighting to make the strongest possible statement [so] that when people are in the theater, [they think], ‘Wow, this is something special. It really affected me.’”

Released in November 1999, “Toy Story 2” grossed more than $240 million in the United States and was critically acclaimed. It was nominated for one Academy Award; the Oscars had yet to add a category for best animated feature film.

Capping the Trilogy

The “Toy Story” characters went into the vault after the release of the sequel, save the “Buzz Lightyear of Star Command” TV series and direct-to-video film, as well as the ongoing release of ancillary merchandise. Relations between Pixar and Disney grew strained, and by 2004, Pixar considered forging a distribution contract with a new studio. Meanwhile, since Disney owned the rights to the characters in the Pixar films it had already distributed, the company put a third “Toy Story” film into development on its own.

However, Disney and Pixar settled their differences and merged in 2006, placing Lasseter in control of all of Disney’s animation projects. He shut down the nascent version of “Toy Story 3,” which involved the rescue of Buzz Lightyear after recall by a toy factory in Taiwan. Lasseter assembled the principal creative team responsible for many of Pixar’s films from the beginning — himself, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and Lee Unkrich — to put together a storyline. Unkrich was later named director.

“Toy Story 3” reached theaters in June 2010 and grossed more than $340 million in its first month, putting it in the top 20 movies of all time. As of this writing, its final total has yet to be realized. The film brings the “Toy Story” saga to a satisfying conclusion, but Pixar continues to work on new films, with “Cars 2,” “Brave,” and “Monsters, Inc. 2” slated for upcoming release.

Looking back on the movie that started it all, Catmull reminisces on the “Toy Story” 10th Anniversary Edition DVD: “It isn’t often one can say, ‘I had a lifelong dream and we fulfilled it,’ and now fulfilling it, we can say, ‘This is the start of something extraordinarily new, and it’s going to forever change the way animated films are made.’”