EMERYVILLE, Calif.  Sheriff Woody was doing some unnatural things. Of course, he’s a cartoon character, an invention of the wizzes at Pixar, but on the screen in front of me, Woody  voiced by Tom Hanks in the “Toy Story” franchise  was spinning his neck uncontrollably, torquing it to “Exorcist” angles and grinning while he did it. I moved the mouse and watched him convulse. Oh, man, animation is fun.

“A character in the film is kind of like a puppet,” Bobby Podesta, a supervising animator at Pixar, explained. “Imagine having Pinocchio in the computer that you move around frame by frame, but instead of having a dozen strings, you’ve got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. It gets very nuanced.” No kidding: just the commands to control Woody’s mouth ran for pages, with each lip curl or quiver adjustable by tenths of a degree.

On a visit to the Pixar campus here, in an old canning factory a short drive from San Francisco, I got a brief lesson in the laborious art of animation. The three-second moment Mr. Podesta showed me, in which Woody is looking at a photo of his owner, Andy, took about a week and a half to do, part of the four-year process that produced the blockbuster “Toy Story 3.”

Since 2001, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added animated feature as an Oscar category, Pixar has dominated, winning five times, with dozens of other nominations and trophies in technical categories. When the best picture field was expanded to 10 last year, “Up,” the adventure story about a crotchety old man and his young, balloon-toting charge, became a best picture contender. This season, “Toy Story 3”  the top-grossing film of the year and arguably the best-reviewed  took that spot, along with one of the three nominations for best animated feature. But the filmmakers behind it, and animators at large, often complain that the rest of the movie industry doesn’t understand or appreciate what they do.