When I was at UC Berkeley (around 1970) there were two computer science departments - one was the boring electrical engineering one - the other was an ad hoc collection of professors. I took classes with the latter group. And among that group was John Whitney:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whitney_(animator)

https://youtu.be/iYHzkx-yf8w

Experiments with Motion Graphics - John H. Whitney 1968 - Educational Film in Computer Graphics

“Experiments in Motion Graphics" is a film produced by John H. Whitney in 1968. It explores the use of computers to create graphic art and motion graphics, s...

^YouTube

Good to know about. It helps fill in the timeline between the Univ. of Utah and Lucasfilm/Pixar.

It reminds me of "Jodorowsky's Dune," an overambitious production--and the first--that was tried in the 1970s to create a movie version of "Dune."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

It didn't get made, but a significant amount of the work for it ended up in other movies. Talent from it also ended up working on other movie productions; IIRC, H.R. Giger, and Syd Mead.

Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) ⭐ 8.0 | Documentary

1h 30m | PG-13

^IMDb

I'd like to add another early CGI work, "Stanley & Stella in: Breaking the Ice" from 1987:

I remember that one because I was in high-school when it came out and I saw it at the time.

@corekase@diaspora.freifunk-naila.net - I saw this one, too, but because of a compilation that came out called "The Mind's Eye."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167285/?ref_=tt_mv_close

There were several sequels to it, as well.

I noted "Breaking The Ice" was made by Symbolics. A bunch of the CG demos I saw at the time were made by them. I didn't know until years later that Symbolics was a Lisp machine company. I use them as an example when people try to say that Lisp machines didn't succeed because they had poor performance.

As I understand the history, there was some "resting on their laurels," and register machines eventually surpassed them in performance, even for running Lisp, and the AI Winter that happened in the late '80s definitely didn't help. The reason Lisp machines were invented was because there was a lot of interest in AI from the 1970s through the 1980s, and without these machines, Lisp was running on slow hardware that wasn't designed for HLL's.

The Mind's Eye (Video 1990) ⭐ 7.7 | Animation, Short

40m

^IMDb

We dedicated an entire IBM 360 to running LISP for some AI work we were doing in the early 1970s.

The head of our department, Clark Weissman, had written a book about LISP.

About 15 years later I worked with several folks from MIT who had moved from LISP to SCHEME - a variation on LISP with different scoping rules.