ADG Perspective

May-June 2017

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8 P E R S P E C T I V E | M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 7 news FILM SOCIETY TO SCREEN BAMBI AND TYRUS When Walt Disney's Bambi opened in 1942, critics praised its spare, haunting visual style, vastly different from anything the studio had done before. The film's striking appearance had been created by Tyrus Wong, a Chinese immigrant artist who took as his inspiration the landscape paintings of the Song dynasty. The extent of his contribution to Bambi, which remains a high-water mark for film animation, would not be widely known for decades. "He was truly involved with every phase of production," John Canemaker, an Oscar ® -winning animator and a historian of animation at New York University, said in an interview for The New York Times. "He created an Art Direction that had really never been seen before in animation." The 2015 documentary Tyrus shows how the quiet beauty of Mr. Wong's Eastern-influenced paintings caught the eye of Walt Disney and became the inspiration for the classic animated feature. For the next twenty-five years, he brought his artistry to Warner Bros. where his striking storyboards and set illustrations helped set the tone for films such as Sands of Iwo Jima, Rebel Without a Cause, William Goldman's Harper and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Of the dozens of films on which he worked, it was for Bambi that he was—belatedly—most renowned. Film Society Screening BAMBI and TYRUS June 25 @ 5:30 PM The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood Above and bottom, center: Two of Mr. Wong's evocative water colors are shown with two frames from the finished BAMBI.

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