Geri's Game

Geri's Game is a 1997 American animated short film produced by Pixar and written and directed by Jan Pinkava. The film was Pixar's first film to feature a human as its main character. The character later made an appearance in Toy Story 2 as "The Cleaner", where he was voiced by Jonathan Harris and Bob Peterson.

Geri's Game was released eight years after Knick Knack, the last short by Pixar to that point, made as part of an effort to reignite the studio's short film series, which had been put on standby in order to focus on the creation of television commercials as well as the studio's first feature film, which would become the first-ever full-length computer-animated film, Toy Story. A dedicated research and development team worked alongside the filmmakers to devise ways to get around the burdens of animating a human character, leading to an in-house computer simulation to mimic the natural movement of clothing on a character. Subdivision surface modeling, a technique partly pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1978 but mostly ignored in favor of NURBS surfaces, was used to bestow natural movement and realistic skin textures on Geri.

Geri's Game premiered on November 24, 1997, winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film the following year. It was the first film distributed by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution to win that award since 1969's It's Tough to Be a Bird. It was later shown with the theatrical release of Pixar's second feature film, A Bug's Life, the following year, and became part of a Pixar tradition of pairing shorts with feature films.