A Computer Animated Hand is the title of a 1972 American computer-animated short film produced by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke.

Library of Congress scholars wrote: "In creating the film, Catmull worked out concepts that would become the foundation for computer graphics that followed.

"[1][2] Catmull hoped as a child to become a Disney animator, but reversed his ideas in high school, ruefully concluding he lacked the ability to draw.

[3] Fred Parke, a fellow Ph.D. student in his class who helped produce the film, recalled that computer animation was "sort of on the lunatic fringe at that time.

It was obvious it would take years for the state of the art in computer hardware to catch up with this ambition, and there were multiple problems on the mathematical and programming side.

[4] Catmull and Parke spent much time crafting the film, measuring the coordinates of each of the corner points of the polygons and typed them into the machine with a Teletype keyboard.

[5] The clips were later used on a TV monitor in the 1976 science-fiction thriller Futureworld, about a futuristic theme park where androids are programmed to grant every guest's wish.

[8] Catmull has won four Academy Awards for his technical feats and helped create some of the key computer-generated imagery software animators rely on today.

Craig Caldwell, senior research professor at the University of Utah, stated in 2011 that the film is groundbreaking, because "it showed the potential of putting three-dimensional form in the computer.