In response to a Guardian piece, Karen Fang writes:
In the recent piece on German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Stuart Jeffries cites the classic Disney animated film, Bambi, as an example of Friedrich’s vast influence. This familiar claim is based on loose visual and historical connections tracing Walt Disney’s interest in European art and the apparent similarities between Friedrich’s misty vistas and the movie’s painterly backgrounds, but it overlooks another, well documented, and equally fascinating creative source—Chinese American immigrant artist, Tyrus Wong, who was lead concept artist for Bambi.
In 1938 the Bambi film adaptation was foundering, despite the many talented European artists handpicked by Walt Disney to help realize his vision. Wong was then a low-level copyist or “in-betweener,” but before coming to Disney Wong was already an accomplished fine artist well known to critics for his elegant oriental brushwork. When Wong, on his own initiative, developed some sample backgrounds that he thought might help the Bambi project, he was swiftly promoted to the film’s lead stylist. Jeffries claims that one of the movie’s final scenes, where “the forest is aflame and Bambi looks up to glowing red heavens,” “is a Friedrich sky”—but it also has a more direct predecessor in a sample painting Wong created for Walt’s review.

This correction, however, doesn’t have to erase Friedrich and German Romanticism by replacing it with Wong and his Song Dynasty-inspired art. Rather, both histories reveal the multicultural influences within this always universal film. Great art should capture imaginations. For decades, a similar mix of Disney history and coincidental visual likeness was used to claim that a picturesque Argentinian forest inspired Bambi.
Bambi, the character, originally “came into the world” from a 1923 Austrian novel. More than a century after Felix Salten’s book, Friedrich’s, Wong’s, and Disney’s art have made Bambi an icon of global visual heritage.
About the Author:
Karen Fang is a literature and film scholar fascinated by the intersection of eastern and western aesthetics. Originally a specialist in British Romanticism, Fang is also the author of the new biography Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong.