The funny thing about Toy Story is that it was far from the first movie to use "toys coming alive" as a theme. I can think of two other movies that did it first that I watched a million times as a kid and those actually inspired me to start writing my first novel (about my toys coming alive and waging war on each other, of course) when I was about twelve years old. Toy Story came out about a year later and I recall thinking "Great, now no one will ever read my book"

(Yes that book was completed. No, no one gets to read it because I wrote it when I was a kid and it's terrible. xD)

Nothing at all against Toy Story though; it's great. It was a huge deal when it came out because of the CGI thing, and for successfully pulling off what Walt Disney did decades before - turning a technological marvel into a story that people care about.