A short film production company

Pixar animation studios was founded in 1979 as part of Lucasfilm. The division was then bought from Lucas by Steve jobs and they went on as a company designed to sell PIXAR computers.

This did not work, and no matter how much money Jobs would throw at the company (which led to his eventual ownership through an investment of over $50 million.

However, the animation section of the company was getting success in advertising thanks to John Lasseter (who most would recognize as the creative director of pixar, or as the guy in the hawian shirt).
Lasseter himself had come from Disney, but was fired after promoting computer animation and then joined Lucasfilm.

Since then pixar has been at the forfront of clever short film animations, with their earliest revolving around a simple lamp jumping on a rubber ball (this is now seen in their title). After this they made a series of shorts in order to advertise their skills to production companies. This is common as very often large companies will use short films as a form of promotion, but Pixar have more recently chosen to add a short at the start or end of each of their movies. One recent example was the film "night and day" about two figures who argue over whether day is better than night, giving examples of las Vegas against a party at the beach.