Claim: Luxo Jr. is a film.

Luxo Jr. is a 1986 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter . The two-minute short film revolves around one larger and one smaller desk lamp . The larger lamp , named Luxo Sr. , looks on while the smaller , `` younger '' Luxo Jr. plays exuberantly with a ball that it accidentally deflates . Luxo Jr. was Pixar 's first animation after Ed Catmull and John Lasseter left Industrial Light and Magic 's computer division . It is the source of the hopping desk lamp included in Pixar 's corporate logo .   Lasseter 's aim was to finish the short film for the 1986 SIGGRAPH , an annual computer graphics conference attended by thousands of industry professionals . The film would come from his experiments with modeling his Luxo lamp . Lasseter worked to improve the story within the allotted two minutes . In animation , the film demonstrates the use of shadow maps within the rendering software . Lasseter applied classic animation principles defined by Disney 's Nine Old Men to convey the lamps ' emotions . Catmull and Lasseter worked around the clock , and Lasseter even took a sleeping bag into work and slept under his desk , ready to work early the next morning . In total it took about four and a half months to do .   The commitment paid off , and it was finished in time to be shown at SIGGRAPH . Before Luxo Jr. finished playing at SIGGRAPH , the crowd had already risen in applause . Luxo Jr. is regarded as a breakthrough in the animation medium as a whole , changing traditionalists ' interpretation of computer animation . The short was the first work of animation to use procedural animation , the software written by Eben Ostby . It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film , becoming the first CGI film nominated for an Academy Award .   In 2014 , Luxo Jr. was deemed `` culturally , historically , or aesthetically significant '' by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry .