Background Artist: The Life and Works of Tyrus Wong

Chinese-American animator Tyrus Wong (1910–2016) “shaped some of America’s best-loved imagery,” according to this scrupulous reconsideration from Fang (Arresting Cinema), an English professor at the University of Houston. After arriving in the U.S. in 1920 under a false identity created to circumvent the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Fang joined his father in Los Angeles. He honed his artistic skills at California’s Otis Art Institute and painted murals for the Federal Art Project before starting at Disney as an “in-betweener”—an artist enlisted to reproduce “endless minor variations in imagery needed to create the illusion of movement.” Eventually, Wong became a lead artist on 1942’s Bambi, using “Chinese-style brushwork” to depict landscapes that were evocative yet subdued enough for the film’s “arduously developed” animal characters to stand out. Throughout, Fang reveals how Wong’s career—which included a stint at Warner Bros., where he worked on such films as 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima—reflected the tension between visibility and invisibility experienced by many of the era’s Asian immigrants, who shaped American culture in ways that were often overlooked or unseen (Wong was initially listed as a background artist in Bambi, for example). Nevertheless, Fang acknowledges that commercial art provided Wong with economic stability “well before” many of his Asian American contemporaries achieved it. The result is a worthy tribute to a groundbreaking artist. (Oct.)