What was the first movie to use CGI?

[Chronos]

I sort of feel like TRON and Star Wars don’t really count, because the computer-generated imagery was depicting computer-generated imagery. And in fact, TRON also features a lot of practical effects depicting computer-generated imagery.

I think I heard that Lady and the Tramp hit some sort of milestone: There’s a scene looking down into an urban canyon showing cars moving along the street, and the cars were animated. And the grand staircase in The Little Mermaid probably also deserves a mention.

[garygnu]

The Great Mouse Detective used computer animation before The Little Mermaid. However, the computer-generated clock gears were technically rotoscoped by hand in between creation and the final animation cels. CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) was in developmentbut didn’t make its feature debut until the rainbow at the end of Mermaid.

IIRC, the Genesis video within Wrath of Khan was not only an early example of movie CGI, but also the first public example of using fractal mathematics to procedurally create realistic terrain and textures.

[Atamasama]

@CalMeacham

Disney apparently thought it interesting enough to a lot of people that they not only followed up with Tron: Legacy in 2010 (has it really been that long?) and are making Tron: Ares , scheduled to be released this October.

There was also Tron: Uprising, an animated series from 2012-2013. It’s really fantastic, and the main character was voiced by Elijah Wood. Bruce Boxleitner reprised his role as Tron. A lot of other great talent as well (Many Moore, Reginald Vel Johnson, Paul Reubens, Lance Henriksen, and so on).

I strongly recommend it for anyone who’s a fan of the Tron films or even curious about them. It took place completely within the computer world and really got into the lore.

(I’ve loved Tron since the first film; I was only 5 when it came out in theaters but I was still blown away by it then. I was most impressed with the idea of people using frisbee weapons and used to throw one around pretending to be in the movie.)

[bump]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

The Last Starfighter is generally taken to be the first fully CGI ‘photorealistic’ animated scenes of ‘live action’ (that is, scenes that actually occur in the world of the film rather than as a simulation within it), and comprise a significant amount of screen time as all of the space battle sequences. They’re pretty bad by modern standards and basically look like first pass rendering of crudely faceted models but it did actually use ray tracing to get shadows and reflections correct rather than as a ‘flat’ image or simple primitives.

Yeah, that trash fire of an article left it and Tron out, which is really perplexing.

And FWIW, it was cool at the time. We could tell it was CGI, but it didn’t look like the crappy models used at the time for most spaceships, and it wasn’t a Star Wars budget movie, so ILM wasn’t doing it either.

[garygnu]

@Atamasama

(I’ve loved Tron since the first film; I was only 5 when it came out in theaters but I was still blown away by it then. I was most impressed with the idea of people using frisbee weapons and used to throw one around pretending to be in the movie.)

I was 4 but probably didn’t see it until it was on home video a little later. Overall plot? Completely opaque. Visuals and the games? Absolutely indelible. Death frisbees! A killer wall appeared behind my bike.

[Babale]

@Cervaise

To show the robot gunslinger’s point of view, they took regular filmed scenes and used computer processing to generate pixelated images, frame by frame. This is certainly computer-generated imagery, so it qualifies.

When you beeline the “Sentient AI” part of the tech tree but are two eras behind in optics and image processing…

[Elmer_J.Fudd]

@Babale

When you beeline the “Sentient AI” part of the tech tree but are two eras behind in optics and image processing..

[garygnu]

And don’t ask Michael Chricton to endorse your theme park’s centralized control room.

[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