Toy Story was Pixar’s first feature film, released before Cars in 2006.
Toy Story premiered in 1995 and became the first entirely computer-animated feature film. Its success established Pixar as a major animation studio and created a production model that later led to films such as A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, and Cars.
The connection to Cars is especially visible in Lightning McQueen’s number 95, which references Toy Story’s release year. Pixar also continued its tradition of combining technically innovative animation with stories centered on emotional relationships and personal growth.
Toy Story was directed by John Lasseter, who later directed Cars and Cars 2. Cars was Pixar’s seventh feature film, arriving after The Incredibles and before Ratatouille. The two films differ in setting and characters, but both use a hidden world of everyday objects as the foundation for their stories.