Let’s remember the forgotten Chinese and Japanese Americans of Disney Animation Studios’s early days.
Words by Caroline Cao
With Disney Animation Studios turning 101 today, it’s time to look into—and celebrate—some of the forgotten AA+PI artists from the studio’s early days.
Since Rita Hsiao’s screenplay credit on Mulan in 1998, more stories by creators of Asian and Pacific Islander descent have been released under the Disney banner. In the past decade, Disney released Raya and the Last Dragon, penned by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim in 2021, and Pixar’s Turning Red, by director Domee Shi and screenwriter Julia Cho in 2022. In addition, We Bare Bears creator Daniel Chong will direct the upcoming beaver comedy, Hopper.
Suppose you rewind to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In that case, you’ll find a generation of artists of Asian descent working during the Golden Age of Disney, many of whom were only recognized for their contributions posthumously.
Artists of Chinese descent
While many of us wept when we watched Bambi as kids, not many of us knew that a Chinese immigrant named Tyrus Wong (1910-2016) and his Song Dynasty-esque concept art defined the vivid flames, delicate snows, luscious flora, and verdant woods of Bambi’s atmosphere.
Born in Taishan, China, 9-year-old Wong endured the arduous Angel Island immigration process before he and his father settled into Los Angeles. As an adult, Wong became a member of the Los Angeles Orientalists, a league of Asian American artists who assembled possibly the first “Asian American” art exhibition in the United States before the term “Asian American” was coined. The group dissolved in the 1940s as a result of the illegal and unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (including Wong’s artist friend, Benji Okubo). Living to tell his story in Pamela Tom’s documentary American Masters: Tyrus, Wong shared his Disney journey of laboring in the in-betweening
department before drawing Bambi concept art, as well as his decision to not participate in the 1941 Disney animators’ strike—and eventually being fired with other employees. He went on to design Christmas cards, earning 3-4 cents per card design, draw concept art for Warner Bros., turn down working on Mulan, and craft kites in his seniority.
Wong’s name is just one brushstroke in Disney’s grand mural of AA+PI artists.
Cy Young (1897-1964), born in Suzhou, China, tragically died with unrealized passion projects. While at New York Audio Productions, he independently produced the 1931 surrealist Mendelssohn’s Spring Song. This is possibly what convinced Walt Disney to hire him as a special effects animator.
Young was the animator behind the blossom-ballerina in Fantasia. The book, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, details his partnership with Ugo D’Orsi and how the “quiet and sensitive but equally stubborn” Young debated the “straightforward, stubborn, and dedicated Italian” animator while they worked on Fantasia over how to light a pot.
Disney fired Young on May 28, 1941, a day before the animators’ strike. He subsequently enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force Signal Corps and designed camouflage on tanks, guns, and aircraft. At least one source indicates that Young’s dream was to launch animated Hollywood projects based on Chinese folklore, with those storyboards found in his Los Angeles home.
Artists of Japanese Descent
Thanks to 20th-century yellow peril imagery and anti-Japanese propaganda inflaming xenophobia across the United States during World War II, incarceration is a tragic thread that runs throughout the background of Disney’s early Japanese American artists.
Assistant animator Chris Ishii (1919–2001) not only worked on Fantasia, Dumbo, and The Reluctant Dragon, but also drew the Lil’ Neebo (“little Nisei boy”) comic strips in a camp newspaper to provide humor and light for fellow internees while they were incarcerated in Amache, Colorado. Tom Okamoto (1916-78), another animator who worked for Disney, temporarily took over for Lil’ Neebo in the camp around December 1942, and went on to draw his own 1950s newspaper comics Deems and Little Brave post-incarceration.
According to the book, Drawing the Line: the Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson, Ishii and Okamoto participated in the 1941 animators’ strike alongside fellow Nisei animators Masao Kawaguchi and James Tanaka—whose birth and death dates are unknown—before the Japanese Americans’ mass incarceration. Ishii also courted FBI scrutiny for drawing courtroom sketches of Iva Toguri, a Japanese American radio personality falsely accused as a Japanese wartime radio protagonist.
Animation die-hards might also know of Iwao Takamoto (1925–2007) for his cartoon canines, starting with his work as the key clean-up artist of Lady in Lady and the Tramp. When he moved on to Hanna-Barbera in the 1960s, he became the father of Scooby-Doo’s eponymous Great Dane (an icon of a still-active IP today). His additional canine contributions included the Jetsons’ dog, Astro and Muttley from Wacky Races and Dastardly and Their Flying Machines. In addition, he shaped the famous spider in the highly regarded 1973 Charlotte’s Web, his only feature directorial credit, using the titular spider’s large eyes to render her “sweet and feminine-looking.”
As recounted in the memoir My Life with a Thousand Characters, Takamoto learned to draw in the Manzanar internment camp. His memoir credits his art practice to a Manzanar internee teacher letting him access the art supply warehouse. It also details his involvement with an internment social club called the “Manzanites,” in which they organized a talent show and arranged movie nights at the makeshift outdoor theater. When Takamoto found employment at the Walt Disney Studios in 1945, the Wartime Relocation Authority saw him fit to photograph as a poster boy to convince internees to leave the camps upon release.
It was during Takamoto’s Disney-era that he also mentored an assistant inbetweener, Willie Ito, who fondly recalled Takamoto as his “sensei.” Ito can also take credit for the famous “Bella Notte” spaghetti-slurp doggie kiss in Lady and the Tramp. Ito’s Disney career was a dream fulfilled ever since he saw Snow White as a 5-year-old. He practiced his drawings and little flipbooks on the Sears Roebuck catalogs delivered to the barracks of the Topaz, Utah internment camp. When released from the camp, the first thing he did was make sure that his dwarf Dopey bank was safe—which he has cherished ever since.
Ito moved on to work at Warner Bros with Chuck Jones, where he had credits on beloved Looney Tunes shorts like “One Froggy Evening” and “What’s Opera, Doc?” He later spent 14 years at Hanna-Barbera Productions, during which he worked with Takamoto in the development and production of The Jetsons. Ito also contributed to The Yogi Bear Show, The Flintstones, and Scooby Doo before he returned to Disney to design merchandise and collectibles. When Ito retired from Disney, he illustrated his friend Shigera Yabu’s 2007 picture book Hello Maggie!, based on Yabu’s childhood memory of adopting a baby bird in the Heart Mountain camp. Ito is currently finishing its 22-minute short film adaptation.
While these artists worked under the House of Mouse, their credentials were more than a gateway for their labor for the Disney corporation. They showed how much of their art served as testimony and expression under a discriminatory American system.
- Joy Sauce first published the article.
- Caroline Cao is an NYC-based writer. A queer Vietnamese American woman, she also won’t shut up about animation and theatre. She likes ramen, pasta, and fan fiction writing. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @Maximinalist.
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