How Long Did Each Toy Story Frame Take to Render?

Ben Gilbert says each frame of Toy Story took an hour or two to render, and Pixar could render only three and a half minutes of footage per week.

Pixar's RenderMan software drew the finished image by computing every pixel from the model, the animation, the shading, and the lighting. Every frame had to be computed again for the object in view, every light source, whether anything was in motion, and how to apply motion blur. The film ran on Sun Microsystems hardware, with 117 machines clustered together as a render farm.

Hand-drawn animation is like painting a picture. Pixar creates a universe and calculates every atom of it. Every step is also a story step, and the group keeps refining the story together for years.