Chapter 5 - Seeing and Making Connections: HES and FRESS

Summary

It is said that the character of Andy in Toy Story was inspired by Andries ‘Andy’ van Dam, professor of computing science at Brown University; several of the Pixar animators were students of van Dam's and wanted to pay tribute to his pioneering work in computer graphics. This piece of trivia has proliferated across the Web in recent years. It started in the IMDB database for the film and now makes an appearance in everything from Webster's online dictionary to Wikipedia. Van Dam thinks it's a cute, little story but probably not true (‘I've tried to stamp it out but it won't die’ (van Dam 2012)). He is proud, however, that the book he coauthored with James Foley, Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, appears on Andy's bookshelf in the film, and that a number of his old students were, or still are, important contributors at Pixar (including producer Galyn Susman and vice president of software Eben Ostby). For a bespectacled professor in his early 70s, van Dam has attained a fair amount of fame; he's certainly the only hypertext pioneer to have made it into a Hollywood blockbuster, even if he is confined to the bookshelf.