Day 15: Film with Great Art
The masterpieces of background artist Tyrus Wong deserve to be
remembered as much as the work of Eyvind Earle, Walt Peregoy, or Disney’s Nine
Old Men, making “Bambi” (1942) my choice for Day 15 of the #FilmsFatale
#GreatFilmChallenge, ‘Film with Great Art.’ The first Chinese-American animator
at the studio (and the only one, while he was there), Tyrus amazingly showed
his watercolours to Walt Disney himself, hoping to get on the Bambi team and
sure enough he did! His ‘California Orientalist’ style brought an abstract,
evocative dreaminess to Disney’s animated films, with landscapes filled mostly
with misty, atmospheric spaces, awash with dreamy pastel light or stormy, moody
hues, and his were some of the rare paintings that practically went into the
picture as is. The visceral, poetic tragedy of “Bambi” was too much for me as a
child (probably even now, haha), but even then I loved the mystical seasonal
backdrops, from the luminous maple leaves in the spring rain and the
twilight-shaded snow, truly a great artist for the books Xo
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