With a “To infinity … and beyond!” Toy Story captured the hearts of kids and adults alike when it reached theaters in 1995. But when the movie began production on January 19, 1993, its makers didn’t know it would rake in and spawn a successful franchise.

They did know that they were attempting something groundbreaking: the first full-length feature film to be produced entirely with computer animation.

“Toy Story was shot entirely on location—in cyberspace,” Wired’s Burr Snider wrote in 1995.

How Toy Story Changed Animation History | Pixar’s First CGI Animated Movie

Prior to Toy Story, animated movies were largely hand-drawn. At that point, “the contribution of computer animation to feature films was measured in seconds or minutes,” wrote a group of Pixar employees in a paper for an international computer conference in 1996.

Pixar had put out several computer-animated short films during the 1980s, including “Tin Toy,” which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and caught the eye of Walt Disney Pictures. Its plot of toys coming to life also provided the basis for Toy Story. In 1991, Disney made a big bet, signing a deal funding a full-length film from Pixar. Toy Story’s creative development phase began that year.

“They essentially made a commitment to the film before we had all the software ready to do it with,” Ed Catmull, then president of Pixar, told Wired. “It was nuts when you think about it, but we knew we could do it.”

Computer animation offered higher visual complexity than hand-drawn animation, from a new 3D style to details like the pattern of the plaid shirt worn by cowboy doll Woody or the precise timing of action hero Buzz Lightyear waving his hand.

“It was a movie. It was lit, it was dimensional, we had cameras moving around through things. … It felt like a movie,” Pixar co-founder John Lasseter said in 2015. “Yet, they were cartoony, and they were moving like cartoons. … They were plastic.”

The new approach also made animation less time- and labor-intensive. Hand-drawn animation could require up to 30 people to complete one shot. Meanwhile, a team of just 30 total animators completed Toy Story’s more than 1,500 shots.

Pixar’s subject matter matched the medium—the animation style rendered geometric shapes well, but struggled with more organic shapes, making them look plastic. Toys were the perfect central characters.

Though Pixar had spent years developing animation tools, still plenty more was left to be figured out on the fly.

“I’d always say, ‘Hey can we do this?’ They’d say, ‘No, but let’s try,’” Lasseter told Time magazine in 2015.

Despite the technological innovation and ingenuity involved, the Toy Story team didn’t want the animation to be the star of the film. Instead, they wanted the story to be the priority.

“There are more PhDs working on this film than any other in movie history, and yet you don’t need to know a thing about technology to love it,” Lasseter told Wired.

That dedication paid off. Lasseter received a Special Achievement Academy Award for the film’s technological prowess, and Toy Story also became the first animated feature ever to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay. The movie launched Pixar’s longstanding commercial success and movies that continued to push the bounds of what was possible in animation.

“It’s the ugliest picture we will ever make, but you don’t care because you get wrapped up in the story to this day,” Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote Toy Story and many subsequent Pixar films, told Time.