Computer animation came into fruition in the 1990s, notably with the release of Toy Story by Pixar, though that is a bit deceiving to the medium’s birth. Pixar may have been the first to make the world of computer animation enjoyable and profitable, but the process of animating through a computer had been in development for decades before that. One of those gentleman at the forefront of computer animation was Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, who created A Computer Animated Hand, one of the first fully-rendered forms of computer animation. The New York Times (via Cinema Blend) announced that the short is now being added to the National Film Registry, to be preserved for future generations. [Read more...]