Friday, January 6, 2017

Tyrus Wong (1910-2016), ‘Bambi’ Production Designer and Artist and Disney Legend, Dies at 106

Tyrus Wong, a Chinese-American painter, printmaker, calligrapher, illustrator, and kitemaker and Hollywood production artist and designer, who was one of the most celebrated artists in US history and most notable for being the delicate driving force behind the production design that inspired Walt Disney’s feature Bambi (1942), has passed away last week at the age of 106. A Disney inspirational sketch artist from 1938 through 41 – and later a career film production illustrator for Warner Bros. from 1942 through 1968 – Wong's work establishing the spare, haunting visual feel of Bambi served as the blueprint for the artistic stylings and was essential to its success as a work of art, yet passed much of his career unknown to the general public. Wong’s contributions to the animated classic were largely unrecognized until half a century after the film arrived in theaters, where critics and filmgoers were struck by its haunting, painterly visuals. Wong was inducted as a Disney Legend in 2001, and received a Historymakers Award for art from the Chinese American Museum.
Legendary Disney artist, Tyrus Wong had a gift for evoking incredible feeling in his art with simple, gestural composition; his influence on the artistic composition of the animated feature Bambi cannot be overstated. Wong had a brief career in animation, working at The Walt Disney Studios only three years, between 1938 and 1941, but made an outsized contribution to animation history with his innovative production design of Bambi. He was working as an entry-level inbetweener, drawing hundreds of sketches of Mickey Mouse to fill in the gaps separating key pose to key pose, at Disney when he showed art director Tom Codrick his atmospheric pastel ideas for Bambi, that provided a solution to Bambi’s backgrounds by suggesting the atmosphere of a forest without describing every leaf and branch.
Codrick showed them to Walt Disney, who was equally excited by the approach. “Looks like we put you in the wrong department,” Codrick told the young artist. Wong was immediately offered the opportunity to “color key the whole picture from beginning to end, to make a painting that sets the mood” of the entire production.

Wong received credit on the final film only as a background painter, but wasn’t recognized for his role as the production designer of the film until many years later. Despite the low pay he received, Wong stayed inside the studio with all the veteran artists during the 1941 strike—”I was being a good boy”—but that didn’t matter. He was let go from the studio a year before Bambi was released. “I don’t feel bitter toward Disney at all, except for a few guys who I know to this day kinda resent me,” he told historian John Canemaker.
Reflecting on his work on Bambi, Wong said, “The script would say, ‘Early morning: the deer goes out onto the meadow.’ I would try to create the atmosphere of that meadow, the fog on it and so forth . . . mood sketches. My painting has always been very poetic—that’s the Chinese influence. In Chinese art, the poet is a painter and the painter is a poet. The object isn’t to reproduce photographic reality, as it is in Western painting, but to capture a feeling.”
Wong himself considered animation to be “a minor, very small part” of his artistic life, which also included twenty-six years as a live-action production designer at Warner Bros. (and other studios) where he worked on renowned, classic films like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Wild Bunch (1969). He also continued his long art career in a variety of mediums as a greeting card designer, and in his spare time, created murals, toys, ceramics, lithographs, and kites.

“Trained as a painter, Mr. Wong was a leading figure in the Modernist movement that flourished in California between the first and second World Wars. In 1932 and again in 1934, his work was included in group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago that also featured Picasso, Matisse and Paul Klee,” as the New York Times writes:

As a staff artist for Hollywood studios from the 1930s to the 1960s, he drew storyboards and made vibrant paintings, as detailed as any architectural illustrations, that helped the director envision each scene before it was shot. Over the years his work informed the look of animated pictures for Disney and live-action films for Warner Brothers and other studios, among them “The Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949), “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) and “The Wild Bunch” (1969). But of the dozens of films on which he worked, it was for “Bambi” that Mr. Wong was — belatedly — most renowned.
A production design painting that Wong produced for the Warner Bros. film “The Wild Bunch” (1969).
Born Wong Gen Yeo on October 25, 1910, in a farming village in Guangzhou (Canton), Guangdong Province, China, Wong was a gifted artist who exhibited a love of painting and drawing at a young age. Wong came to the United States in 1920 at the age of 9 in hopes of economic opportunity, where he lived with his father, a laborer — leaving his mother and sister behind, never to see them again. Upon arriving in California, father and son travelled under false identities in order to take advantage of a loophole in the immigration laws created by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and were held and became separated at Angel Island due to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). After enduring the immigration process — which often included lengthy interrogations — they lived in Sacramento before moving to Los Angeles. 

Tyrus Wong in 2013 with one of his fantastical kites.
At the time, the thought of a Chinese American being a professional artist was almost unheard of. And yet amidst working as a houseboy, a janitor, and later a busboy, Tyrus forged on. The artistic spark began when Wong’s father encouraged him to practice calligraphy every night by dipping his brushes in water and “painting” on newspaper, but they were so poor that they couldn’t afford ink. “We can’t afford ink or rice paper,” Wong once said. “But he made me do it with water. That’s a good training.” The fleeting nature of the drawings helped inform Tyrus’ style—one in which minimal brush strokes are used to evoke worlds of emotion and feeling.

As a junior high student, Wong’s talent was evident to his teachers, who along with his father encouraged him to pursue art. He received a full-time summer scholarship to Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, working while pursuing his education.

 When his scholarship ended Wong decided to pursue an art career full-time, and his father somehow managed to scrape up the then-$90 tuition to let him stay on as Otis’s youngest student. He studied there for at least five years, simultaneously working as the school janitor, before graduating in the 1930s. Not long afterward his father died, leaving Wong entirely on his own.

 After graduating, Wong put his gifts and training to use in Hollywood. From 1936 to 1938, Wong worked as an artist for the Works Progress Administration, creating paintings for libraries and other public spaces. Newly married, Wong said he “needed a job.” It was at that time he began the Disney studio in 1938 at first as an “in-betweener” on Mickey Mouse shorts, in which artists were creating thousands of intermediate drawings that bring animated sequences to life. When he heard that the studio was in pre-production on adapting Felix Salten's Bambi, a Life in the Woods, he went home and painted several pictures of a deer in a forest and soon submitted his own landscape paintings as an audition for a job in that production. The small, but evocative sketches and background paintings captured the attention of Walt Disney and became the basis for the film’s visual style.
While the backgrounds in Snow White were incredibly detailed, Disney was struck by Wong’s ability to create lush, impressionistic backgrounds that sing with color, minimalistic brush strokes, and feeling. “His styling made it different from any other Disney film … you feel the dampness and moisture of everything in the forest, but you didn’t draw every single leaf–they were beautiful,” recalled Marc Davis, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men. Composed of Disney’s core group of animators, the Nine Old Men helped bring some of Disney’s most celebrated works, from Snow White to The Rescuers to life. Walt had the 28-year-old Wong begin working on Bambi later that same year and he was unofficially promoted to the rank of concept artist, helping to influence the film's music, coloring, special effects, and more. Walt Disney saw that Tyrus was able to produce exquisite artwork that did not necessarily look like the forest—but rather, felt like the forest. Walt’s vision for Bambi and use of Tyrus’ work still influences films today. 
Wong spent two years painting the inspirational illustrations that would inform every aspect of Bambi, and throughout the finished film his influence is unmistakable. But Wong was fired in the wake of the bitter 1941 artists strike.

From Disney, Wong next joined nearby Warner Bros., in 1942, working as a concept and story artist, designing sets and storyboarding sequences for the next 26 years until his retirement in 1968. He became a United States citizen in 1946, the same year he made a name for himself as a distinctive designer of Christmas cards for Hallmark – and painted elegant Asian-inflected designs on what is now highly-collectable dinnerware, highly sought after by collectors. Living with his wife in Sunland, CA, Wong became in retirement a renowned kitemaker, designing and building astonishing hand-made creations up to 100 feet long.
In the final decades of his life, Wong received significant attention, starting with a chapter in John Canemaker’s book Before the Animation Begins (1996). In 2001, in formal recognition of his influence on Bambi, Wong was named a Disney Legend, an honor bestowed by the Walt Disney Company for outstanding contributions, and his work has continued to inspire and influence the leading animators of today. A retrospective of Wong’s work was the inaugural exhibition of the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles in 2003. More recently, in 2013, Wong's long career was the subject of a major retrospective “Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong” at the Walt Disney Family Museum (with an accompanying hardcover book) in San Francisco, which traveled to the Museum of Chinese in America in New York.

A 1995 award-winning feature-length documentary about the artist Wong’s life, Tyrus, was recently completed by Pamela Tom in 2015. Here is the trailer:
Wong reportedly died at this home in Sunland, CA, and was predeceased by his wife, Ruth. He is survived by his three daughters Kim Wong, Kay Fong, and Tai-Ling Wong; and two grandchildren.

A Disney Legend and fixture at Disney anniversary functions in Los Angeles – Tyrus Wong will never be forgotten. Tyrus’ lively spirit will be missed. For more information on Tyrus Wong, I highly recommend a surprisingly in-depth New York Times obituary which offers some fascinating details on Wong’s early years.
Today, Wong’s legacy lives on in his beautiful work that has served as inspiration to countless artists working at Disney and Pixar today. Tributes have been pouring in from around the industry, including from Frozen’s head of story Paul Briggs, Zootopia director Rich Moore, Inside Out co-director Ronnie del Carmen, and visual development artist Claire Keane, among others:



Here are a few of Wong’s iconic pastel concepts for Bambi:
Beginning in the 1960s, Wong started fostering a passion for kite-making and created intricate and colorful kites that he would fly on weekends at the Santa Monica Pier and other Los Angeles area beaches. Here are a few examples:
RIP, Tyrus Wong. Thank you for your incredible contributions to Bambi, Disney, and the world of art.

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