Pixar Pioneers Win $1 Million Award for CGI Breakthroughs

Pixar's former president Edwin Catmull and founding employee Pat Hanrahan have been awarded the 2019 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their contributions to computer graphics. The award is handed out by the Association for Computing Machinery and is named after Alan Turing, a mathematician who developed code-breaking technology that assisted the British army in World War II. Turing Award recipients receive a $1 million prize, which Catmull and Hanrahan will split. Funds will be provided by Google. The press release states that Catmull and Hanrahan's influence on the computer graphics industry has impacted data center management and artificial intelligence. "CGI has transformed the way films are made and experienced, while also profoundly impacting the broader entertainment industry,” ACM President Cherri M. Pancake said in a statement. “...Catmull and Hanrahan’s contributions demonstrate that advances in one specialization of computing can have a significant influence on other areas of the field. For example, Hanrahan’s work with shading languages for GPUs, has led to their use as general-purpose computing engines for a wide range of areas, including my own specialization of high-performance computing." [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/02/21/pixars-onward-review"] Catmull helped revolutionize computer imagery by introducing a way to display curved textures around 3D polygons in the 1970s while he was earning his PhD. After college, he founded the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, which is stated in the press release as one of the first computer graphics labs in the country. In 1979, George Lucas hired Catmull for LucasFilm. Steve Jobs eventually bought Catmull's division at Lucasfilm, renamed it Pixar, and made Catmull the president. Hanrahan is said to be one of the first hires at Pixar after working briefly in Catmull's New York Computer Graphics Lab. Hanrahan led projects at Pixar that led to breakthroughs in the lighting of textures in CGI environments. He helped develop 3D rendering software known as RenderMan, which was the engine that would prove powerful enough to make the first feature-length computer-generated movie, Toy Story. Even before Toy Story's release, Pixar would license the RenderMan system to be used on movies such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, according to The New York Times. After Toy Story's release, Pixar continued to share the technology with the filmmakers working on the Star Wars prequels, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Avatar. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=the-best-movies-on-disney&captions=true"] Catmull retired from Pixar in 2018, but stayed on as an adviser until July 2019, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The NY Times reports that Hanrahan left Pixar in 1989 to become a professor at Princeton and Stanford. He continues to teach computer graphics and electrical engineering at Stanford, according to an article from Stanford.edu. “The announcement came totally out of the blue and I am very proud to accept the Turing Award,” Hanrahan said, according to Stanford.edu. “It is a great honor, but I must give credit to a generation of computer graphics researchers and practitioners whose work and ideas influenced me over the years.” The press release states the award will be officially handed out at a ceremony on June 25. Pixar's Onward is currently in theaters, which IGN's critic, Kristy Puchko, praised in her review. However, given recent coronavirus-related movie theater closures, it may be best to watch another one of Pixar's movies or another Disney classic on Disney+. Here's our list of the best content available on Disney+. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Petey Oneto is a freelance writer for IGN.