Catmull, a computer scientist and former president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, and Hanrahan, a founding employee at Pixar, have both been recognized for fundamentally influencing the field of computer graphics. Thanks to them, what were once blocky shapes made from polygons have been transformed into curved surfaces displaying mind-blowing detail. Pixar’s Toy Story, released in 1995, was Hollywood’s first fully computer-animated film and is the inspiration for the dozens of animated movies that have since followed — none of which would have been possible without the work of Catmull and Hanrahan, who will share the $1 million prize.

Their work influences not only animated movies, but Hollywood special effects, virtual reality and video games — in fact, much of the entertainment we enjoy these days can be attributed to the Pixar pioneers.

“Because 3D computer graphic imagery is now so pervasive, we often forget what the field was like just a short time ago when a video game like Pong, which consisted of a white dot bouncing between two vertical white lines, was the leading-edge technology,” said Jeff Dean, senior vice president at Google AI. “The technology keeps moving forward, yet what Hanrahan and Catmull developed decades ago remains standard practice in the field today — that’s quite impressive. It’s important to recognize scientific contributions in CGI technology and educate the public about a discipline that will impact many areas in the coming years—virtual and augmented reality, data visualization, education, medical imaging, and more.”

Hinton, for instance, proved that a then-rare backpropagation algorithm could help neural networks solve problems that were previously unfeasible. LeCun was instrumental to developing technologies behind modern computer vision, while Bengio helped foster generative adversarial networks (that is, pitting a creative network against another that serves as a kind of quality control) that can create original images.

The trio will formally receive the award at an event on June 15th. While all three are well-known in their field, the recognition says a lot about both their work and the evolving nature of the industry itself. Where earlier prizes typically went to pioneers in general computing, it’s now AI taking center stage — the technology has become a cornerstone of search engines and social networks, and it’s only likely to become more important as autonomous vehicles and robots come into play.