Release
Lasseter and his technical directors slept under their desks at times to get Tin Toy finished before SIGGRAPH in Atlanta in August 1988, but to no avail. What the SIGGRAPH audience saw was the first three-fifths or so of the film, ending a cliffhanger moment with Tinny running into his box and watching in horror through the box's cellophane as Billy advances towards him. "Even though it wasn't complete, people were wowed by it," producer Ralph Guggenheim remembered. Despite Tin Toy not being complete, the audience of scientists and engineers to which it was shown at SIGGRAPH greeted it with a standing ovation. These praises were joined over the years, positive assessments of public and critics, who praised the innovation and technology in it. Luke Bonanno called it "One of the best Pixar short films," while other critics wrote that the film was "A fascinating glimpse of a fledgling art form." and many praised the ability to move in just a few minutes and have been able to "encompass the full range of emotions you feel when a toy is used by a child." Some criticisms were leveled at the character of Billy, who was called "the most frightening and disturbing piece of animation in the history of this art form.". Dario Floreano stated that the uncanny valley concept was taken seriously by the film industry because of negative audience reactions to Billy.
Tin Toy went on to take the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1989 at the 61st Academy Awards and was the first computer generated animated short film to receive an Oscar. With the award, Tin Toy went far to establish computer animation as a legitimate artistic medium outside SIGGRAPH and the animation-festival film circuit. A member of the Academy's board of governors, animator William Littlejohn, saw in Tin Toy a window into the potential of the young medium. "There is a realism that's rather astonishing," he told The New York Times. "It emulates photography, but with artistic staging." Robert Winquist, head of the character animation program at CalArts, went farther, predicting that computer animation was "going to take over in a short time." He publicly advised animators, "Put down your pencil and your paintbrush and do it another way."
The short was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 2003.
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