442: The Asian American artists of Disney’s Golden Age animation

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.

If you rewind back to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 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 it was a Chinese immigrant named Tyrus Wong (1910-2016) and his Song Dynasty-esque concept art that defined the vivid flames, delicate snows, luscious flora, and verdant woods of Bambi’s atmosphere.

Tyrus Wong.

Courtesy of "Tyrus" documentary

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 inbetweening 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.

Cy Young.

From John Canemaker's book "Paper Dreams"

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 aircrafts. 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.