NEW YORK — When Walt Disney’s “Bambi’’ opened in 1942, critics praised its spare, haunting visual style, vastly different from anything Disney had done before.
But what they did not know was that the film’s striking appearance had been created by a Chinese immigrant artist, who took as his inspiration the landscape paintings of the Song dynasty. The full extent of his contribution to “Bambi,’’ which remains a high-water mark for film animation, would not be widely known for decades.
Like the film’s title character, the artist, Tyrus Wong, weathered irrevocable separation from his mother — and, in the hope of making a life in the United States, incarceration, isolation, and rigorous interrogation — all when he was still a child.
In the years that followed, he endured poverty, discrimination, and chronic lack of recognition, not only for his work at Disney but also for his fine art, before finding acclaim in his 90s.
Mr. Wong died Friday at 106. A Hollywood studio artist, painter, printmaker, calligrapher, greeting-card illustrator, and, in later years, maker of fantastical kites, he was one of the most celebrated Chinese-American artists of the 20th century.
But because of the marginalization to which Asian-Americans were long subjected, he passed much of his career unknown to the general public.
Artistic recognition, when Mr. Wong did find it, was all the more noteworthy for the fact that among Chinese immigrant men of his generation, professional prospects were largely limited to menial jobs like houseboy and laundryman.
Trained as a painter, Mr. Wong was a leading figure in the modernist movement that flourished in California between the wars. In 1932 and again in 1934, his work was included in group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago that also featured Picasso, Matisse, and Paul Klee.
As a staff artist for Hollywood studios from the 1930s to the 1960s, he drew storyboards and made vibrant paintings, as detailed as any architectural illustrations, that helped the director envision each scene before it was shot.
Over the years, his work informed the look of animated pictures for Disney and live-action films for Warner Bros. and other studios, among them “The Sands of Iwo Jima’’ (1949), “Rebel Without a Cause’’ (1955), and “The Wild Bunch’’ (1969).
But of the dozens of films on which he worked, it was for “Bambi’’ that Mr. Wong was — belatedly — most renowned.
“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 this obituary in March. “He created an art direction that had really never been seen before in animation.’’
Wong Gen Yeo (the name is sometimes romanized Wong Gaing Yoo) was born on Oct. 25, 1910, in a farming village in Guangdong province. As a young child, he exhibited a love of drawing and was encouraged by his father.
In 1920, seeking better economic prospects, Gen Yeo and his father embarked for the United States, leaving his mother and sister behind. Gen Yeo would never see his mother again.
On Dec. 30, 1920, after a month at sea, the Wongs landed at Angel Island Immigration Station. The elder Wong was traveling as a merchant named Look Get; his son as Look Tai Yow.
In Sacramento, where he joined his father, a schoolteacher Americanized “Tai Yow’’ to “Tyrus,’’ and he was known as Tyrus Wong ever after.
From 1936 to 1938, Mr. Wong was an artist for the Works Progress Administration, creating paintings for libraries and other public spaces.
With friends, including Japanese-American artist Benji Okubo, he founded the Oriental Artists’ Group of Los Angeles, which organized exhibitions of members’ work — an unheard-of level of exposure for Asian artists at the time.
Mr. Wong, newly married and needing steady work, joined Disney in 1938 as an “in-betweener,’’ creating the thousands of intermediate drawings that bring animated sequences to life.
Asians were then a novelty at Hollywood studios, and Mr. Wong was made keenly aware of the fact, first at Disney and later at Warner Bros. One co-worker flung a racial epithet at him. Another assumed on sight that he worked in the company cafeteria.
Then there was the affront of the in-betweener’s job: Painstaking, repetitive, and for Mr. Wong quickly soul-numbing, it is the assembly-line work of animation — “a terrible use of his talents as a landscape artist and a painter,’’ Canemaker said.
A reprieve came in the late 1930s, when Mr. Wong learned that Disney was adapting “Bambi, a Life in the Woods,’’ the 1923 novel by Austrian writer Felix Salten about a fawn whose mother is killed by a hunter.
In trying to animate the book, Disney had reached an impasse. The studio had enjoyed great success in 1937 with its animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’’ a baroque production in which every detail of the backgrounds was meticulously represented.
In an attempt to use a similar style for “Bambi,’’ it found that the ornate backgrounds camouflaged the deer and other forest creatures on which the narrative centered.
Mr. Wong spied his chance.
“I said, ‘Gee, this is all outdoor scenery,’ ’’ he recalled in a video interview years afterward, adding: “I said, ‘Gee, I’m a landscape painter!’ ’’
Invoking the exquisite landscape paintings of the Song dynasty (A.D. 960–1279), he rendered in watercolors and pastels a series of nature scenes that were moody, lyrical, and atmospheric — at once lush and spare — with backgrounds subtly suggested by a stroke or two of the brush.
“Walt Disney went crazy over them,’’ said Canemaker, who wrote about Mr. Wong in his book “Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists’’ (1996). “He said, ‘I love this indefinite quality, the mysterious quality of the forest.’ ’’
Mr. Wong was unofficially promoted to inspirational sketch artist.
“But he was more than that,’’ Canemaker explained. “He was the designer; he was the person they went to when they had questions about the color, about how to lay something out. He even influenced the music and the special effects: Just by the look of the drawings, he inspired people.’’
Mr. Wong spent two years painting the illustrations that would inform every aspect of “Bambi.’’ Throughout the finished film — lent a brooding quality by its stark landscapes; misty, desaturated palette; and figures often seen in silhouette — his influence is unmistakable.
But in 1941, in the wake of a bitter employees’ strike that year, Disney fired Mr. Wong. Though he had chosen not to strike — he felt the studio had been good to him, Canemaker said — he was let go amid the lingering climate of post-strike resentments.
On “Bambi,’’ Mr. Wong’s name appears, quite far down in the credits, as a mere “background’’ artist.
Mr. Wong joined Warner Bros. in 1942, working there — and lent out on occasion to other studios — until his retirement in 1968.
Mr. Wong leaves three daughters, Kay Fong, Tai-Ling Wong, and Kim Wong; and two grandchildren.
