That was Sun's calculation in 1995. Toy Story had over 110,000 frames, and each took 2 to 13 hours to render. In 1987 Ed Catmull and two colleagues had set their renderer a goal of a feature film in about a year: three minutes a frame. The obvious fix is the fastest computer in the world. But a frame doesn't need the frame before it; the computer drawing it gathers the whole scene itself. So Catmull, Pixar's chief technical officer, stopped shopping for speed. Pixar measured rendering per dollar with its own benchmark, the rendermark, and Sun's machines were cheaper by almost a factor of two. They built a wall: 117 computers, each the size of a pizza box, about 300 processors, each machine taking one frame at a time, day and night, in a room called the Sun Farm. Faster computers never made frames quicker: as Jim Blinn put it, rendering time stays the same because you keep adding detail. Catmull said they could use 1,000 times more power. They were limited by the budget, not their appetite.

The frames, the wall and the little ball here are our own drawings, not images from the film.

Which movie trick should we take apart next?

Sources: Sun Microsystems press release, 1995; Jeff Ubois, "Sun goes Hollywood", SunWorld, November 1995; Cook, Carpenter and Catmull, "The Reyes Image Rendering Architecture", SIGGRAPH 1987; Disney/Pixar Toy Story production notes, 1995; Jim Blinn, Caltech Heritage Project interview, 2024.
Sounds: Freesound, CC0 (thaighaudio, ohrpilot); Apple iMovie sound effects.