Why Movies Were Just Better In The 1990s

The world of animation also has the '90s to thank for perhaps its best era, as both 2 and 3-dimensional animated films released by different studios absolutely dominated the industry at the time.

Some of the greatest animation innovations of the decade included the pioneering technique of blending together 2-dimensional animation with 3-dimensional computer-generated images to create characters or set pieces for movies. One of the best examples of this is 1999's The Iron Giant, which was the directorial debut of Brad Bird. The film used a clever combination of traditional 2D-drawn animation for all of the characters, combined with the titular giant being created entirely using CGI and then fused with the 2D work.

Perhaps the biggest trailblazers of the decade were Pixar, who released Toy Story in 1995, which was the first ever fully computer-animated movie. The production of the animation, apart from being groundbreaking, was painstakingly slow, as the animators at Pixar had 117 computers running 24 hours a day to render the 114,240 frames of the film. Some of the individual frames in Toy Story even took 30 hours to render, depending on their complexity and how much detail was in it.