“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.
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