SAN FRANCISCO — Genndy Tartakovsky is a 35-year-old man who still wakes up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons. He confesses: "I can't outgrow them."

Even a night of hard drinking when he was younger wouldn't keep him from dragging himself out of bed the next morning to watch his favorite shows.

"I'd be so hung over," said Tartakovsky. "But I loved them."

That passion and persistence paid off for Tartakovsky, whose list of credits includes the hit animated television shows "Samurai Jack" and "Star Wars: Clone Wars."

As creative director at Orphanage Animation Studios Inc. he now finds himself among a small group of Northern California artists hoping to rival the towering front-runners in Hollywood computer animation: Pixar Animation Studios Inc. and Dreamworks Animation SKG Inc.

While the Bay Area upstarts have yet to make a feature-length film, companies such as Orphanage, Wild Brain Inc. and CritterPix Inc. have announced separate plans to make computeranimated feature films with characters that they hope moviegoers will embrace as fondly as Pixar's "Buzz Lightyear" and Dreamworks' "Shrek."

The rub is that the new players find themselves working on shoestring budgets, often with hand-me-down technology, and working under noose-tight deadlines.

"You can't look at Wild Brain in its current state and say we're going to be competitors to Pixar," said Charles Rivkin, who was named CEO of the San Francisco-based company in September. "On the other hand, we would hope in the near future we make it into their rearview mirror."

Consider what the challengers are up against: Dreamworks produced "Shrek 2," the third highest-grossing movie ever ($436 million) and the No. 1 animation film of all time, and the company is only No. 2 in the market.

Pixar emerged as the industry heavyweights by releasing the first computer-generated movie, "Toy Story," in 1995. It has since produced an unprecedented string of five hits, including "A Bug's Life," "Monsters Inc." and "Finding Nemo," which have made about $3.2 billion sales worldwide.

Pixar and Dreamworks, whose executives declined to comment for this story, benefit from technological prowess that cost them millions to develop. Their rendering software allows characters to interact in three dimensions, adding lifelike qualities that wow audiences.

Wild Brain and the Orphanage lack such resources, relying on off-the-shelf software and building other digital tools to enhance the quality, says BZ Petroff, Wild Brain's production director, who worked on "Toy Story" while at Pixar.

Wild Brain has the same improvisational spirit that Pixar had back before anyone had coined the term computer animation, she said.

"Pixar had practically nobody who had worked on a motion picture before," Petroff recalled. "They had an industrial designer who worked on cars. Not 'Cars' the Pixar movie but cars in Detroit. He worked in the automobile industry. ... Nobody was doing this kind of work then."

When it comes to computer-generated short films, Wild Brain's system has proven successful.

In 2001, the company released "Hubert's Brain," a dark comedy about a lonely boy who finds a talking brain. The 17-minute film won the award for best professional computer generated short film at the 2001 World Animation Celebration in Los Angeles.

The Orphanage, founded in 1999 by three former employees of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, is further behind Wild Brain in its evolution. The company is best known for supplying special effects for live-action films such as "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Sin City."

After spending 11 years producing mostly commercials, Wild Brain made inroads toward the big screen when it penned a five-picture deal last year with Dimension Films, a unit of Walt Disney Co.'s Miramax Films.

Under the agreement, each company will co-finance and co-produce films that Miramax will distribute.

Orphanage, headquartered in San Francisco, will seek a similar financing and distribution partnership, Tartakovsky said.