From LA’s Chinatown to the Disney lot: The life of 'Bambi' artist Tyrus Wong

When the opening credits first rolled on Bambi in 1942, moviegoers saw the name “Tyrus Wong” flash by for barely a second, listed simply as a background artist.

They couldn’t have known the film’s dreamlike, mist-filled forest — rendered in soft washes of color, so different from Disney’s earlier, theatrically bright style — sprung from the brush of a Chinese-born artist from L.A.

In Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong, University of Houston film scholar Karen Fang digs into how Wong became one of the first Asian American artists to put a stamp on Hollywood in the 1940s, when the political climate made belonging in U.S. society — much less artistic recognition — an enormous feat.

We also learn how Wong, who died in 2016 at age 106, built a legacy that went far beyond Bambi.

Wong’s post-Disney work as a motion picture illustrator at Warner Bros. lives on in films such as Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild Bunch, where he helped directors visualize some of the most iconic scenes in American cinema.

His greeting cards for companies like Hallmark sold millions, making his work some of the most widely circulated of any Asian American artist of his generation.

The Sunland-Tujunga resident also left a lasting mark on his city, from Chinatown, where he designed the “shy boy” logo for Phoenix Bakery, to Santa Monica, where spectators still recall seeing Wong fly his ornate, handmade kites well into his final years.

Tyrus Wong took commercial clients such as Phoenix Bakery, whose "shy boy" logo designed by Wong still adorns the shop today.

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“Many people knew him only as the kite man of Santa Monica and didn't know anything about all of the other incredible chapters of his life and career,” Fang said.

Talent takes shape in Chinatown

Wong emigrated from China as a child of 9 or 10 and settled in L.A.’s Chinatown with his father during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, when immigrants could not become citizens or own land.

While many Chinese men labored in restaurants and laundries, Wong’s father had higher aspirations for his bright but mischievous son, who liked to play hooky. His father, Look Get, became his first formal art teacher, drilling Wong nightly in Chinese calligraphy, with the characters practiced on old newsprint.

Wong was sent to study at Benjamin Franklin Junior High in Pasadena, where teachers were impressed by the posters he made for clubs and dances and urged him to apply to what is now the Otis College of Art and Design, then located near MacArthur Park and known for making scholarships available to promising students.

At the time, some imagined Wong might become a sign painter or go into lettering — already a step up for a Chinese immigrant then — but Otis set him on the path to fine art and, eventually, a commercial career.

Reimagining Bambi's forest

By his late 20s — newly married to Ruth Kim Ng and gaining recognition as a fine artist — Wong joined Disney in a entry-level role as an “in-betweener,” making sketches and supporting senior artists.

Meanwhile, Walt Disney, hot off the success of Snow White, was reaching for another milestone with the animated adaptation of the novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods by Austrian author Felix Salten.

But it was proving a challenge to animate a story set entirely among animals.

Listening to the studio chatter, Wong took it upon himself to visit the Los Angeles Public Library downtown and check out Salten’s novel.

On his own time, Tyrus Wong checked out the Felix Salten novel "Bambi" from the L.A. Public Library to develop concept art for the Disney film.

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“He reads it, and he figures out, ‘My goodness, this is all about landscape. This takes place entirely outdoors,’” Fang said.

Drawing from Chinese landscape painting, he made sample art that prioritized shadow, shade and negative space over strict perspective to suggest distance and mood that would “give the feeling of the forest without painting every leaf and every tree,” Fang said.

Wong passed his work to higher-placed friends inside the studio, who got it in front of Walt Disney, who gave an ecstatic green light. Wong was quickly moved out of in-betweening, and all the artists on Bambi were told to follow his style, Fang said.

Art at a time of exclusion

As Wong helped shape an iconic American film, the Chinese Exclusion Act remained in effect — not to be lifted until 1943, a year after Bambi’s release.

Wong could later recall instances of poor treatment by some colleagues, but by and large, the creative communities Wong moved through starting at Otis cared about what artists brought to their work rather than their background, Fang said.

But for all of Wong’s outsized impact on Disney’s pet project, he never met the studio head as he recounted in Pamela Tom's 2015 documentary Tyrus.

He would last just three years at Disney, laid off with many other members of the animation crew after a 1941 labor strike, with a year of Bambi still to go.

Wong’s recognition for Bambi wouldn’t come until the last decades of his life. He was in his 90s when he was named a Disney Legend in 2001.

At the award ceremony, Wong took Roy E. Disney’s hand and remarked how he’d never had the opportunity to shake his uncle Walt’s.

Busy at Warner Bros. — and beyond

After getting laid off from Disney and needing to support his family, Wong moved over to Warner Bros., where he spent nearly three decades as a motion picture illustrator, helping directors shape the look of their films through prop art and concept images.

He worked on dozens of films, spanning genres from westerns to Doris Day musicals.

What made Wong invaluable, Fang says, was his speed. Used to working as quickly as watercolor dries, Wong’s brush could lay down a lot of information fast. Art directors requested him, while some collectors sought out his sketch work as pieces of art in their own right.

Tyrus Wong painted a dragon mural in Chinatown's Central Plaza.

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Los Angeles Public Library

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As he worked in Hollywood, Wong continued exhibiting as a fine artist. He designed a popular line of ceramics and created best-selling greeting cards for Hallmark and California Artists.

His portfolio included Christmas cards with imagery of decorated trees, presents and angels, rendered in his unmistakable brush style, sometimes with Asian features.

“It's Asian American before the term,” Fang said. “It's explicitly bicultural. This was always the most sort of fascinating instance of an American celebration of its multicultural heritage.”

Unlike other fine artists, Wong didn’t shy away from commercial work. As Fang puts it, there was a pragmatism to his choices as an immigrant and a refreshing lack of snobbery informed by the Chinese art tradition, where works on paper don’t rank below below oil on canvas as in the West.

The Kite Man of Santa Monica

Even as he made his mark nationally through his commercial endeavors, Wong also had a creative impact locally.

He painted murals and artwork throughout Chinatown, most famously the “shy boy” logo that still adorns Phoenix Bakery to this day.

Later in life, Wong would turn the coastal sky above Santa Monica into a moving canvas for his handmade kites.

Tyrus Wong made art across L.A., from Hollywood to Chinatown and Santa Monica, where he used to fly his handmade kites before admiring spectators.

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“He starts in his retirement, and he has nothing to do, and his wife sort of says, ‘Well, go fly a kite,’” Fang said. “And he thinks, ‘I used to fly kites when I was a kid. Kites are a Chinese invention.’”

Wong hand-built kites from bamboo and cane — flocks of birds, pandas with moving limbs and hundred-segment centipedes that would require multiple helpers.

His kite-flying became a regular event at the same location on Santa Monica Beach, knitting together a community of family, like his three daughters, regulars and passersby.

Wong kept at it well into his final years, Fang said.

In one documentary encounter from his 90s, the filmmaker arrived expecting to find an elderly man in a chair — only to see Wong racing past his crew on the sand.