Buzz Lightyear, Dory and Mike and Sulley are moving into downtown Miami for the season. The Science Behind Pixar opens Saturday, Oct. 10, at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science on Biscayne Boulevard, with more than 50 interactive stations that show how a Pixar film actually gets made. It runs through April 11, 2027, and it is included with every museum ticket.

The exhibit was developed by the Museum of Science in Boston together with Pixar Animation Studios, and it is built for exactly the kind of kid who has watched Toy Story twenty times and is starting to ask how. The answer involves a lot of math, and the exhibit makes that the fun part.

Eight steps from sketch to screen

The exhibit follows the eight stages of Pixar's production pipeline, in order: modeling, rigging, surfaces, sets and cameras, animation, simulation, lighting and rendering. At each one, visitors get their hands on the problem the studio's artists and computer scientists had to solve.

That means building a digital character out of shapes, giving it a skeleton so it can move, choosing the textures that make a surface read as fur or metal, framing a shot with a virtual camera and lighting a scene. The challenges are drawn from films readers know by heart, including Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles and A Bug's Life. Along the way, members of Pixar's production teams explain how they do the same work at the studio.

The photo stops

Scattered through the gallery are life-size recreations of Pixar characters, including Buzz Lightyear, Dory, Mike and Sulley, Edna Mode and WALL•E. They are the moments your phone will come out, and they are also the anchors that make each stage make sense: you see Sulley's finished fur after you have learned how hard it was to simulate.

Where it is and when to go

The exhibit fills the Hsiao Family Special Exhibition Gallery on the first floor of Frost Science, 1101 Biscayne Blvd., next door to the Pérez Art Museum Miami. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. There is no separate ticket for Pixar: admission to the exhibit is included with all museum admission tickets, so the rest of the museum comes with it.

Members get the first look with a sneak preview on Friday, Oct. 9. Starting in November, members also get Member Mornings from 10 to 11 a.m. on the first Saturday of each month, an hour in the gallery before the general crowd.

Making the most of it

The opening weekends and school holidays will be the busiest days, so a weekday afternoon is the move if your schedule allows it. Give the gallery a solid hour; the stations reward kids who stay and try again. For younger children, start with the characters and the camera and lighting stations, where the results show up instantly on screen. Older kids and adults will get the most out of rigging and simulation, where the exhibit shows what is happening underneath a single blink or a wave of water.

Make a day of Museum Park while you are there. The Pérez Art Museum Miami next door opens Picasso-Klee-Matisse: Masterpieces from the Museum Berggruen on Oct. 29, and the walk between the two buildings takes a couple of minutes. A Pixar morning and a Picasso afternoon is a very good Saturday, and it makes the point the exhibit is trying to make: art and science are closer cousins than school schedules suggest.

With a six-month run, there is no rush. But if you have a Pixar fan at home, Oct. 10 is the date to circle, and a Frost membership is worth a look if you think you will go back more than once before April.