Ithaca College

Andrew Utterson recently contributed an invited essay to the Library of Congress’s National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) National Film Registry (NFR).

 Each year, the Library of Congress’s National Film Preservation Board selects up to 25 “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” to appear on its National Film Registry, part of a wider effort “to ensure the survival, conservation, and increased public availability of America’s film heritage.”  

This particular essay focuses on the aesthetic, technical, and industrial legacy of one of these films, A Computer Animated Hand, produced by Ed Catmull and Fred Parks at the University of Utah in 1972, long before the widespread use of CGI and other visual effects in Hollywood and beyond. Catmull would go on to co-found Pixar Animation Studios in 1986 and is the current president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. This film pioneered a number of key technical and aesthetic principles in the field of computer animation, and anticipated a film industry increasing founded on digital visual effects.

Andrew Utterson is the author of From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age (British Film Institute / Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).