Question: What year was the film, which used the process to generate animated images and is attached to "The Smurfs" film, released?
Context: The Pixar Photoscience Division was founded in 1979 at Lucasfilm for the express purpose of designing and building a laser recorder/scanner system to input and output film to a computer for compositing and color correction of special effects.  In the early years of Pixar's history, the team was responsible for the design of color monitoring instrumentation to control the color gamut and gamma of the digital images onto 35mm film using a more advance laser recorder system called PixarVision.  In later years at Pixar, the team was responsible for transforming the artists computer animated images onto film master negatives.  Today the team manages all digital content to a variety of delivery media, film, DVD, and digital cinema projection.  The team has won Engineering and Technical Academy Awards and patents for their work in Motion Picture Sciences. Science On a Sphere (SOS) is a spherical projection system created by NOAA.  It presents high-resolution video on a suspended globe rather than a flat screen, with the aim of better representing global phenomena.  Animated images of atmospheric storms, climate change, and ocean temperature can be shown on the sphere to explain these complex environmental processes.  SOS systems are most frequently installed in science museums, universities, zoos, and research institutions, although new and novel uses for these systems in a variety of presentation spaces and contexts are starting to emerge. Multiple-image Network Graphics (MNG) is a graphics file format, published in 2001, for animated images.  Its specification is publicly documented and there are free software reference implementations available. The zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures.  Created by photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879, it may be considered the first movie projector.  The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion.  The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes.  A second series of discs, made in 1892–1894, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then colored by hand.  Some of the animated images are highly complex, featuring multiple combinations of sequences of animal and human movement. The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol is an American computer/traditionally animated short film based on "The Smurfs" comic book series created by the Belgian comics artist Peyo.  The animated short was written by Todd Berger and directed by Troy Quane, and it stars the voices of George Lopez, Jack Angel, Melissa Sturm, Fred Armisen, Gary Basaraba, Anton Yelchin and Hank Azaria.  The film was produced by Sony Pictures Animation with the animation by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Duck Studios.  "The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol" was released on DVD on December 2, 2011, attached to "The Smurfs" film. The Smurfs: The Legend of Smurfy Hollow is an American computer/traditionally animated short film based on "The Smurfs" comic book series created by the Belgian comics artist Peyo.  The animated short was written by Todd Berger and directed by Stephan Franck, and it stars the voices of Melissa Sturm, Fred Armisen, Anton Yelchin, Alan Cumming and Hank Azaria.  The film was produced by Sony Pictures Animation with the animation by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Duck Studios.  "The Smurfs: The Legend of Smurfy Hollow" was released on DVD on September 10, 2013.  The film is loosely based on Washington Irving's short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". The Smurfs and the Magic Flute (French: La Flûte à six schtroumpfs , lit.  "The Flute of Six Smurfs") is a 1976 Belgian animated film starring the Smurfs, directed by their creator, Peyo.  Though the film premiered in 1976 in Belgium, and 1979 in the United Kingdom, an English language version was not released in the United States until 1983, in the wake of the characters' newfound popularity. Synthetic MRI is a method in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), for generating contrast weighted images based on measurement of tissue properties.  The synthetic images are generated post scan from parametric maps of tissue properties.  It is thereby possible to generate several contrast weightings from the same acquisition.  This is different from conventional MRI, where the signal acquired from the tissue is used to generate an image directly, generating only one contrast weighting per acquisition.  The synthetic images are similar in appearance to those normally acquired with an MRI scanner. FlixMix is a puzzle game developed and published by Celeris, Inc.  The game focuses on solving jigsaw-like puzzles with animated images. Computer animation is the process used for generating animated images.  The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation "only" refers to the moving images.  Modern computer animation usually uses 3D computer graphics, although 2D computer graphics are still used for stylistic, low bandwidth, and faster real-time renderings. Sometimes, the target of the animation is the computer itself, but sometimes film as well.
Answer: 2011