The first fully computer-animated feature film. It also, almost by accident, invented modern Pixar.
Andy's toys come to life when humans aren't looking. Woody, a pull-string cowboy, has been Andy's favourite for years. On his birthday, a new toy arrives — Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger who does not realise he is a toy. Woody's jealousy escalates into an accident that strands both toys in the outside world, where they have to cooperate to make it home before Andy moves house.
Every frame of Toy Story was rendered on a render farm — 117 SGI workstations, an immense investment of computer time for 1995 hardware. The film took 800,000 machine-hours to render. There is no live-action footage, no traditional cel animation, nothing photographic. This had never been done before at feature length.
What Pixar understood — and what Disney almost didn't — was that the technology was a constraint, not the story. Computer animation in 1995 could render plastic, fur was hard, hair was harder, water was harder still. So the team set their story in a world where every character was made of plastic. The medium dictated the subject. That choice is why Toy Story still looks good thirty years later: the film never asked the rendering engine to do something it couldn't.
Woody and Buzz are the model for most Pixar pairs that follow — Mike and Sulley, Marlin and Dory, Carl and Russell. Two characters with opposing temperaments forced into shared problem-solving. The writer's room — which included Joss Whedon at one point — drew on screwball-comedy DNA more than on Disney precedent.
What's notable is how thorny the leads are. Woody is petty, jealous, willing to push another toy out of the window. The film does not make him likable until late in the second act. Pixar's central characters are almost always written with these flaws first; it's part of how the studio's emotional architecture works.
Hanks was cast as Woody on the basis of his voice work in earlier shorts; Tim Allen was cast as Buzz after Billy Crystal turned down the role (Crystal said later it was the biggest mistake of his career — he made it up by taking Mike Wazowski in Monsters Inc.).
Both performers calibrated their delivery for a medium that, in 1995, hadn't yet developed its own voice-acting tradition. Hanks plays Woody slightly louder than he'd play a live-action role — knowing the animation can't carry the smaller register — and the choice has been studied at voice-acting schools ever since.