This Saturday, July 31, after a tour around the world, the Pixar 25 year retrospective made its hometown debut at the Oakland Museum of California.

 Pixar: 25 Years of Animation, is a major exhibition of more than 500 works by artists at the Pixar Animation Studios. The animation film company will display a plethora of drawings, paintings, and sculptures that highlight the Emeryville-based company’s wildly successful computer-animated films.

Art work will encompass a range of items, from ‘Ratatouille’, to the smash hit ‘Up’, and all the way to Pixar’s latest, ‘Toy Story 3’, will be displayed at the Oakland Museum.

Pixar folks hope to get a lot of local love from Oakland and the East Bay.

“Hopefully people will feel pride, said Eylse Klaidman, who manages Pixar’s exhibition program. “Hopefully people will feel a strong connection.”

Klaidman said about half of Pixar’s 1,100 employees live in the East Bay. The other half live in San Francisco.

The Pixar exhibit’s return home to Oakland comes after a worldwide tour that began at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005 and then went around the world to museums in Europe, South America, and Japan.

Rene de Guzman, senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California said he’s very excited to host the exhibit. “This is the cumulation of years of work,” he said. “This has been an incredible journey.”

“It’s been such a joy traveling around the world with this exhibit,” said Klaidman who is also manager of Pixar archives and is the director of Pixar University. “because people know Pixar. They know our characters and the words in our stories. They love them and they come to our exhibit with love, I think. But, also they don’t know what to expect from the individual artists, and the craft, and the designs.”

Pixar’s retrospective will run through January 9, 2011 and will accompanied by screenings of Pixar’s feature and short films; a special program of lectures, talks and workshops with Pixar artists.

Klaidman said the exhibit is really about the art and the artists of Pixar. “There’s been a lot written about Pixar,” said Klaidman “And a lot you hear about the technology innovations and CG animation, and about how cool Pixar itself is, but you know we have this whole treasure of artists who draw and paint and sculpt and use whatever tools they want as artists to create one of the foundations for our films. "

Pixar artifacts include pencil drawings, paintings in acrylic, sculptures that form the backbone of the computer-generated images, and video interviews with artists. In addition, the exhibit will show behind-the-scenes footage of Pixar’s creative process.

A highlight of the exhibition will be two special media installations-Artscape, an immersive, wide-screen projection of digitally processed images that give the viewers the sensation of entering into the original artworks; and the Pixar Zoetrope, a three-dimensional device that displays a rapid succession of images, creating the illusion of motion.

The Pixar showcase will take over a good portion of the museum. The Pixar exhibit will be installed in roughly 11,000 square feet of temporary exhibition galleries and expand into common spaces such as hallways and museum store.

For more information about the Pixar exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California click here.