Using his background in character animation, Wedge helped MAGI produce animation for television commercials, which eventually led to an offer from Walt Disney Productions to produce animation for the film Tron (1982). : 12–13 At MAGI, Wedge met Eugene Troubetzkoy, who held a Ph.D in theoretical physics and was one of the first computer animators.
MAGI was an early computer technology company which produced SynthaVision, a software application that could replicate the laws of physics to measure nuclear radiation rays for U.S. In the late 1970s, Chris Wedge, then an undergraduate at Purchase College studying film, was employed by Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. History 1980–1989: Formation and early computer animation 1.4 2019–2021: Disney acquisition and closure.1.3 2002–2018: Feature films under 20th Century Fox.1.2 1989–2002: Television commercials, visual effects and Bunny.1.1 1980–1989: Formation and early computer animation.Scrat, a character from Ice Age, was the studio's mascot.
Ice Age and Rio were the studio's most commercially successful franchises, while Robots (2005), Horton Hears a Who! (2008), The Peanuts Movie (2015), and Spies in Disguise were among its most critically praised films. The studio ceased all operations on April 10, 2021. In February 2021, Disney announced that Blue Sky would be shut down in April 2021 citing the economic impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns on its business operations. īlue Sky Studios was a subsidiary of 20th Century Animation until its acquisition by Disney, as part of their acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets in 2019. It produced 13 feature films, the final one being Spies in Disguise, released on December 25, 2019. Its first feature, Ice Age, was released in 2002 by 20th Century Fox. Using its in-house rendering software, the studio created visual effects for commercials and films before dedicating itself to animated film production. It was founded in 1987 by Chris Wedge, Michael Ferraro, Carl Ludwig, Alison Brown, David Brown, and Eugene Troubetzkoy after their employer, MAGI, one of the visual effects studios behind Tron, shut down. was an American computer animation studio based in Greenwich, Connecticut. at the Wayback Machine (archived June 9, 2021) (now redirects to disney.