Disney\u2019s animators were struggling to bring \u201cBambi\u201d to the screen. The wide-eyed fawn and his feathered and furry friends were literally lost in the forest, overwhelmed by leaves, twigs, branches and other realistic touches in the ornately drawn backgrounds.
\u201cToo much detail,\u201d Wong thought when he saw the sketches.
On his own time, he made a series of tiny drawings and watercolors and showed them to his superiors. Dreamy and impressionistic, like a Chinese landscape, Wong\u2019s approach was to \u201ccreate the atmosphere, the feeling of the forest.\u201d It turned out to be just what \u201cBambi\u201d needed.
Wong, who brought a poetic quality to \u201cBambi\u201d that has helped it endure as a classic of animation, died of natural causes early Friday morning in his Sunland home, said his daughter Kim Wong. He was 106.
\u201cI can’t emphasize how significant a figure he is for L. A. and for the industry,\u201d said filmmaker Pamela Tom, whose documentary about Wong premiered last year. \u201cThere will never be another Tyrus Wong.\u201d
Called the film\u2019s \u201cmost significant stylist\u201d by animation historian John Canemaker, Wong influenced later generations of animators, including Andreas Deja, the Disney artist behind Lilo of \u201cLilo and Stitch\u201d and Jafar in \u201cAladdin.\u201d
\u201cI was 12 or 13 when I saw \u2018Bambi.\u2019 It changed me,\u201d Deja told The Times in 2015. \u201cThere was something about the way the forest was depicted that had a layer of magic to it.
\u201cTyrus Wong really made that film look the way it did.\u201d
Wong worked at Disney only a few years, his employment cut short by a strike in 1941. But he quickly was picked up by Warner Bros., where for more than 25 years he drew storyboards and set designs for such movies as \u201cRebel Without a Cause,\u201d \u201cThe Wild Bunch\u201d and \u201cSands of Iwo Jima.\u201d
A trained painter, Wong also gained recognition in international art circles.
In 1934, the Art Institute of Chicago held an exhibition of prints from artists around the globe, including a landscape piece Wong had done using the dry-point printmaking technique. Featured in the same exhibit was an etching by Pablo Picasso titled \u00ab\u00a0Two Nudes\u00a0\u00bb and a lithograph by Diego Rivera.
Around that same time, Wong partnered with other artists in Los Angeles \u2014 including Japanese American Benji Okubo \u2014 to set up local exhibitions, which offered rare moments of visibility for the city\u2019s Asian artists.
When he retired from Warner Bros. in 1968, he continued to paint, turning some of his work into top-selling Christmas cards for Hallmark. He also channeled his artistry into kitemaking and in his 10th decade was still flying his creations \u2014 swallows, snow cranes, a 100-foot-long centipede \u2014 at Santa Monica State Beach.
In the award-winning documentary \u201cTyrus,\u201d Wong opened up about racism within the industry, something Tom said the artist didn\u2019t like to dwell on. The discrimination sometimes came in the form of coldness from other artists, but other times it was more direct. On his first day at a now-defunct studio, the art director referred to Wong using an offensive racial slur.
For Tom, a fifth-generation Chinese American who worked at Disney in the \u201990s, Wong became a hero. She discovered him almost two decades ago while watching \u201cBambi\u201d with her young daughter. At the end of the movie, there was a special feature on a man she\u2019d never heard of before.
\u201cI thought, \u2018Wait a minute, what? A Chinese artist working in Hollywood in the \u201930s, and at Disney of all things?\u2019\u201d she said, adding that she almost immediately tracked him down and invited him to lunch at her family\u2019s restaurant.
By the end of the meal, she said she knew she needed to make a film about him. After some convincing \u2014 it wasn\u2019t just about him, she reminded him, but about the history, the art and the Chinese American community \u2014 he agreed. The process took more than a decade.
During Wong\u2019s starving artist years, Tom said, he scraped together money in a variety of ways: picking asparagus, working as a janitor, designing greeting cards.
His reputation for creating Christmas cards spread, reportedly even catching the attention of Joan Crawford, who contacted him about making one.
\u201cShe wanted me to design an original Christmas card for her, but she didn\u2019t want to pay the $15! Fifteen dollars!\u201d he told The Times in a 2004 interview.
Wong was born in Guangdong province in southern China on Oct. 25, 1910. Pigs and chickens lived under the family roof, which leaked, and food was suspended from a hook in the ceiling \u201cso that the rats wouldn\u2019t eat it,\u201d Wong recounted in \u201cOn Gold Mountain,\u201d a memoir by Lisa See.
At age 9 he said goodbye to his mother and sister and sailed to America with his father, Look Get Wong. On Dec. 30, 1920, they landed at Angel Island.
His father was free to head to the mainland because he had immigrated earlier and had his papers. Tyrus, however, was confined to the immigration station. As he tried to control his nerves, he recalled chewing on a piece of gum he\u2019d gotten from a guard until it had no taste, before turning it into a toy. \u201cIt was just like jail,\u201d he later said of the lonely month he spent there.
Immigration officials quizzed him about his family and home back in China to ascertain if he really was Look Get Wong\u2019s son. On Jan. 31, 1921, they issued his identification papers and he was reunited with his father. He never saw his mother and sister again.
He went to Sacramento, where his father tried to scrape by working for a cobbler. But the elder Wong knew nothing about repairing shoes, so when a better opportunity arose in Los Angeles, he moved there, leaving Tyrus behind until he got settled.
He wound up sending for his son sooner than he had planned. With his father gone, Tyrus started skipping school. Notified of the boy\u2019s delinquency after a month of absences, the senior Wong had him put on a train to L. A..
\u201cWhen I got off the train,\u201d Wong told See, \u201cmy father hit me for doing so badly.\u201d
He placed a high value on education, but he was, Wong later said, \u201ca very, very good father.\u201d He recited classical Chinese poetry to his son and taught him to paint, draw and write calligraphy. Unable to afford proper paper and ink, Tyrus practiced on newsprint with a brush dipped in water.
They lived in Chinatown but he attended school in Pasadena, where he painted posters for school events. His junior high principal was impressed by his artistic ability and helped him obtain a scholarship for one term at Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design). Wong later received a full scholarship.
At Otis he studied the giants of Western art, such as Daumier. He spent much of his spare time looking at Japanese and Chinese brush painting, particularly Song dynasty landscapes that conveyed mountains, mist and trees with minimal strokes.
\u201cI learned that nature is always greater than man,\u201d he said in See\u2019s book. \u201cIt is the balance and harmony between man and nature that is important.\u201d
After graduating from Otis in 1935, he joined the Depression-era Federal Arts Project, creating paintings for public libraries and government buildings.
In 1938 he was hired at Disney but didn\u2019t think he would last long. Being an \u201cin-betweener\u201d required little creativity and a lot of eye-straining tedium.
Then he heard about \u201cBambi,\u201d based on the book by Felix Salten.
\u201cI said, \u2018Gee, this is all outdoor scenery [and] I\u2019m a landscape painter. This will be great,\u2019\u201d he recalled in a video for the Disney Family Museum, which showcased his work in a 2013 exhibit.
When \u201cBambi\u201d art director Tom Codrick saw Wong\u2019s sketches, Wong recalled later, \u201cHe said, \u2018Maybe we put you in the wrong department.\u2019\u201d The rest of the team agreed, including Walt Disney.
\u201cI like that indefinite effect in the background \u2014 it\u2019s effective. I like it better than a bunch of junk behind them,\u201d Disney said in Thomas\u2019 and Johnston\u2019s book, \u201cWalt Disney\u2019s Bambi: The Story and the Film.\u201d Disney later said that of all the animated films he produced, \u201cBambi\u201d was his favorite.
\u201cHe set the color schemes along with the appearance of the forest in painting after painting, hundreds of them, depicting Bambi\u2019s world in an unforgettable way,\u201d Johnston and Thomas wrote. \u201cHere at last was the beauty of Salten\u2019s writing, created not in script or with character development, but in paintings that captured the poetic feeling that had eluded us for so long.\u201d
In Wong\u2019s last decades he was known for the magnificent kites he made at home in Sunland and flew on the beach to the delight of passers-by.
\u201cYou get a certain satisfaction in making them, and you get a certain satisfaction flying them,\u201d Wong said in a 1995 interview with The Times. \u201cSome are attention-getters, but that\u2019s not what I\u2019m after. I used to go fishing a lot, and I love fishing. This is just like fishing, except in fishing you look down. Kite flying, you look up.\u201d
The end of 2016 will be a wet one in L. A. County; 2016 was a year of surprises and heartbreak ; some New Year’s resolutions that can only be accomplished in L. A.; and hundreds of new laws will soon take effect in California.
In El Monte, a city in the San Gabriel Valley, a bonus pension approved by the city council in 2000 generates a big bill for taxpayers. Here’s how it works.
Ben Santer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco has become more vocal over the years in hopes of beating back claims that climate change isn\u2019t real.
A woman is dead after the car she was driving rammed through a guardrail on a downtown overpass and plunged onto the 110 Freeway, prompting the closure of northbound lanes Thursday morning. (Irfan Khan \/ Los Angeles Times)
Military and state authorities failed to save a 2-year-old boy from abuse.
Military and state authorities failed to save a 2-year-old boy from abuse.<\/p>\n