Blue Sky Studios

Blue Sky Studios, Inc. was an American visual effects and computer animation studio, which was based in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was founded on February 22, 1987 by Chris Wedge, Michael Ferraro, Carl Ludwig, Alison Brown, David Brown and Eugene Troubetzkoy after their employer, Mathematical Applications Group (MAGI), one of the visual effects studios behind Tron (1982), got sold to Vidmax Canada and eventually closed. Using its in-house rendering software, the studio created visual effects for commercials and films before dedicating itself to animated film production. It produced 13 feature films, the first being Ice Age (2002) and the final one being Spies in Disguise (2019). Blue Sky Studios became a subsidiary of 20th Century Animation in 1997 through its VIFX division's majority-stake acquisition of the studio and became the principal animation studio of 20th Century Fox from 2002 until its acquisition by the Walt Disney Company, as part of their acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets in 2019. Disney closed down Blue Sky on 10 April 2021 and absorbed its library and IPs into 20th Century Animation. Ice Age and Rio were the studio's most commercially successful franchises, while Robots (2005), Horton Hears a Who! (2008), The Peanuts Movie (2015), and the aforementioned Spies in Disguise were among its most critically praised films. Scrat, a character from the Ice Age franchise, was the studio's mascot.