We now expect impeccable CGI in feature films, but that hasn’t always been the case. It’s taken decades of experimentation to get to this point. We’ve scoured the history of CGI and selected a few of our favourite innovations for you to feast your eyes on:

Westworld (1973)

The original Westworld would be very familiar to anyone who’s seen the HBO remake. Essentially, amusement park androids go bad and start killing the guests who’ve come to have a wild west experience. This is where the first digital animation in film comes in, to represent the pixelated POV of one of the gunslinging robots.

Tron (1982)

If you’re looking for CGI firsts, Tron is full of them. To name just one, it was the first film to have extensive (almost 20 minutes) fully CGI animation, which included a “light cycle” race. Impressive, considering the team behind Tron had to use a computer with only 2MB of memory.

Toy Story (1995)

Without Toy Story, who knows if we’d have other fully CGI classics like The Incredibles and Monsters, Inc.? With a team of 27 animators and a tiny budget, Pixar managed to create the first completely CGI feature film.

Avatar (2009)

True, Avatar might be remembered for its 3D aspect, but it made great strides in CGI, too. It was the first film to use facial motion capture to effectively reproduce the actors’ emotional performances in CGI, bringing an end to the “dead eye syndrome” that plagued previous CGI created from human performances.

What’s next for CGI? We’ve already seen CGI replace late actors, such as Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: Rogue One, but as yet it seems that we haven’t found a way to make these replications fully believable; there’s an element of the uncanny valley to them. Perhaps in the future, CGI animators will find a way to make photorealistic human copies, which could render actors obsolete.