40+ Years Later, The First Ever CGI Character in Film History Is Coming to Paramount+

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Nicholas Rowe with a cut on his face in 'Young Sherlock Holmes'

Published Mar 25, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

In over three years at Collider, senior author Jake has now penned over 2500 articles covering a wide range of TV and film for the resources, lists, utilities, news, and interview teams. Alongside interviewing stars such as Selin Hizli, Rose Ayling-Ellis, Harlan Coben, and Chelsea Peretti, Jake was lucky enough to visit the set of Aardman and Netflix's Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl in 2024, getting the chance to chat with four-time Academy Award winner Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham. Jake has also worked for other publications, including Agents of Fandom.

The revolving door of streaming is turning once again, and Paramount+ are about to deliver a movie that many might not realize marked a hugely important milestone in the development of filmmaking. When discussing computer technology in film, the mind quickly thinks of Pixar, with their work on 1995’s Toy Story the moment animation in cinema changed forever as they proved, not only could a film be made entirely from computer-generated imagery, but it could also be an enormous hit with audiences.

However, before they became a household name, Pixar was once the Computer Graphics Division within Lucasfilm during the 1970s and 1980s. As part of Lucasfilm and parent company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Pixar initially changed the animation game via an unlikely live-action source. In the 1985 feature Young Sherlock Holmes, directed by Oscar-winning Barry Levinson, this team of animators developed the first ever fully 3D computer-generated character, with six months taken to craft a short scene including a stained-glass knight made via the genius of forward-thinking artists.

Excitingly, forty years on, Young Sherlock Holmes is about to join streaming site Paramount+. As of April 1, 2026, you can catch this milestone-marking movie in all its glory on the streamer. Thanks to its innovation, the film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects, although it missed out on the prize to Ron Howard's Cocoon. Earning positive praise from critics, Young Sherlock Holmes was a hit, with Roger Ebert writing humorously about the unique use of computers:

"I liked the effect, but I would have liked it more if, at the end of the movie, Holmes had drawn Watson aside, and, using a few elementary observations on the apparent movement of the stained glass, had deduced the eventual invention of computers."

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'Young Sherlock' is Currently on Everyone's Minds

Max Irons as Mycroft Holmes standing outside with Natascha McElhone as his mother in Young Sherlock

Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic deerstalker-wearing, crime-solver, Sherlock Holmes, has been adapted in seemingly every way. Most recently, Prime Video dropped a new series directed by Guy Ritchie, who returns to the franchise following his helming of a pair of popular blockbusters earlier this century. Young Sherlock, based on the young adult thriller novel series Young Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lane, has been a huge hit ever since it debuted, with a cast including Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Natascha McElhone, Joseph Fiennes, Dónal Finn, Max Irons, and Colin Firth, turning a set of doting novels into a must-watch streaming show.