How Pixar's technology helped develop more lethal military drones

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https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-12-02/how-pixars-technology-helped-develop-more-lethal-military-drones.html#

How Pixar’s technology helped develop more lethal military drones

The 3D modeling systems that made ‘Toy Story’ possible have been key to enabling unmanned aircraft to navigate and aim their weapons with greater precision

MANUEL G. PASCUAL
Madrid - DEC 02, 2025 - 11:32 EST

Pixar’s animated films and military drones have something in common. One of the key technologies in the success of the studios behind Toy Story and Finding Nemo has also been crucial in enabling unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to gain precision and become a lethal tool widely used in wars like those in Gaza and Ukraine. This technology is 3D rendering, or object modeling, systems developed by Pixar, which now belongs to Disney. Pixar uses this technology to create more realistic animations; drones use it to better understand the space they navigate and reach their target.

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RenderMan was conceived at the University of Utah in the 1970s, where one of Pixar’s founders, Ed Catmull, earned his doctorate precisely on rendering problems. Catmull is probably the only person to have won both an Oscar (2008) for his contribution to the animation industry and a Turing Award (2019), considered the Nobel Prize of computer science, for his “for fundamental contributions to 3D computer graphics, and the revolutionary impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI) in filmmaking and other applications.”

What is less well known is that the research conducted by Catmull and his colleagues was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One of Catmull’s colleagues at the University of Utah, the Vietnamese-born scientist Bùi Tường Phong, came to the U.S. in the 1970s precisely through DARPA, as revealed by Theodore Kim, an associate professor of computer science at Yale, who worked at Pixar and was a colleague of the Asian researcher.

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Why would the Pentagon want to support these kinds of projects? The advances of the Hanoi-born scientist were transferred to F-16 fighter jet flight simulators in the 1980s, significantly improving their graphic resolution. And advanced rendering programs, such as RenderMan, built upon Dr. Phong’s work, have been fundamental to the recent success of military drones. Pixar declined to comment to EL PAÍS for this report.

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