In November 2012, just before the studio’s 90th anniversary, Disney released a six-and-a-half-minute animation which hinted that revolution was in the air. Directed by John Kahrs, a veteran of Pixar’s explosively creative early years, it was titled Paperman, and had its head in the past in many respects: it was black and white, had no spoken dialogue, and was set in Frank Capra-era 1940s New York.

What made it radical was its look. Using a new piece of software called Meander, Kahrs and his artists had managed to fuse rich three-dimensional computer graphics with the tactility and vigour of old-fashioned hand-drawn art.
“There was this notion of, we’re the only studio in the world that has this breadth of talent,” Paperman’s producer Kristina Reed told the technology magazine Wired at the time. “Is there something we can do by actually matching them together? Is there some new place we can go visually that no studio has gone before?”

The industry held its breath. Here was arguably the biggest technological and stylistic leap forward in the medium since 1995, when Toy Story brought digital animation to cinemas in the first place. Once this extraordinary new style found its way into a major feature-length film, animation would be changed for good.

Sure enough, six years later, it was – but Disney wasn’t the studio to do it. In 2018, Sony Pictures Animation released Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, an all-ages superhero adventure in a similar hybrid style that combined the best qualities of traditional and digital techniques. The result was a film that looked like a comic book come to life: scribbled swooshes and squiggles flew seamlessly through detailed CG environments, while characters’ emotions were, as in times of old, literally written across their faces in thoughtful, human-etched lines.