The dairyman’s son majored in fine arts, then headed to the Rhode Island School of Design for an advanced degree in sculpture. But when he enrolled in a freshman drawing class at the University of Michigan, he found his calling. He has said that as a child, he was more comfortable holding a football than a crayon. Van Allsburg’s family ran a dairy business, processing raw milk into cottage cheese and ice cream. Young Chris caught tadpoles in the pond down the street. Parents were married, to each other, and tended to have two or three kids. Growing up in Grand Rapids, Mich., in the 1950s, what Van Allsburg had was the kind of idealized childhood that Americans now dream of. “I’ve heard stories about authors filled with this kind of Lotto-winner hubris,” Van Allsburg said. Most, he recalled, were longer on enthusiasm than on capital. Between his accolades and a generation of filmmakers who were regaling their own children with “Jumanji,” “The Polar Express,” “Two Bad Ants” and other Van Allsburg works, the bear-shaped, bearded author entertained a stream of offers. “Jumanji,” published in 1981 by Houghton Mifflin, also earned Van Allsburg a National Book Award for book illustration. Two of his 14 titles have won Caldecott Awards, the highest prize for illustrated children’s books. Van Allsburg now uses such jargon so convincingly that it’s hard to imagine that in the 3 1/2-year course of “repurposing” his book “Jumanji” into TriStar’s big 1995 holiday release, opening Friday, the artist and author never spent a single day on the West Coast. Among the phrases Chris Van Allsburg picked up in his total-immersion introduction to Hollywood was the expression “laying pipe.” For most people the term might suggest sewer construction, but Van Allsburg soon learned that laying pipe is actually a crucial element of story development-meaning that the weirdness a character displays in Act 1 will explain the plot twists in Act 3.

Jumanji 1981 book