Open your mind with these animation facts!

• In 1979 some computing students at the New York Institute of Technology began making The Works, which would have been the world's first film made entirely from computer animation. However, script and technology problems forced the project to be abandoned and the distinction eventually went to Toy Story, more than fifteen years later.

• Some frames of a typical Pixar film are so complex it can take up to ninety hours for a single computer to translate all the information held in them to a finished image.

• A 5,200-year old bowl found in Iran features an early precursor of animation. Along the bowl's side are five drawings that, when viewed in a sequence, depict a wild goat leaping up to eat leaves off a tree.

• Character animation students at the California Institute of the Arts use classroom number A113. The number appears somewhere in every Pixar film, from a car number plate in Toy Story to a secret computer directive in Wall*E, and a courtroom in Up.