What was the first movie to use CGI?

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@CalMeacham

The still photo renderings I have seen for The Last Starfighter (published in Cinefantastique when the film came out) look gorgeous – not cartoony like the images in the film. I can only conclude that they had to do some budget cutting at some point, and were forced to use “good enough” images instead of the closer to photorealistic images they were cpable of producing. The same folks made a pitch to Lucas to do the special effects for future Star Wars movies. The renderings of the X-wings they did looked damned good, but, again, it’s not clear they would have looked that good onscreen. Lucas did, of course, use CGI for his Special EDition and later for the “first” trilogy (starting with Episode 1), but that was after quite a bit of time had passed, and computing costs came down.

The problem was that the rendering full animations (on a Cray X-MP) would literally take so long that would exceed the production schedule for the film (one person estimated 17 months) so they basically did much more coarse renders.

Last Starfighter - CGI making of (1984)

@Stranger_On_A_Train

This wasn’t the first such animation—Lucasfilm had done similar CGI animations for JPL—but probably the first in a feature film.

Here is a history of photorealistic computer-generated animations for NASA which led to cinematic-quality CGI:

How NASA Visualized Voyager, and Helped Revolutionize Cinema

Stranger