Chinese artist whose paintings inspired Disney’s ‘Bambi’ and other films, dies at 106

In the late 1930s, when few doors were open to the son of a poor Chinese immigrant, Tyrus Wong landed a job at Walt Disney’s studio as a lowly “in-betweener,” whose artwork filled the gaps between the animator’s key drawings. But he arrived at an opportune moment.

Disney’s animators were struggling to bring Bambi 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.

“Too much detail,” Wong thought when he saw the sketches.

In his spare time, he made a series of tiny drawings and watercolours and showed them to his superiors. Dreamy and impressionistic, like a Chinese landscape, Wong’s approach was to “create the atmosphere, the feeling of the forest”. It turned out to be just what Bambi needed.

Wong, who brought a poetic quality to Bambi that has helped it endure as a classic of animation, died of natural causes just after midnight early Friday morning in his Sunland home, said his daughter Kim Wong. He was 106.

“Ty had a different approach and certainly one that had never been seen in an animated film before,” legendary Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston once wrote of the humble artist, whose contributions to one of the studio’s iconic productions went largely unheralded for years.