Gyo Fujikawa

Actually I can’t be completely sure that the woman called “Lotus” in The Reluctant Dragon is Gyo Fujikawa. There are barely any images of her available that I can find online. There’s a great deal of her work, but information about her as a person is surprisingly limited. She has no IMDb page, presumably because she mostly did promotional art of the Walt Disney Studios instead of working as an animator. And frankly it wouldn’t be surprising, given what was happening at the studio when The Reluctant Dragon was filmed, to have had a person who wasn’t one of the striking animators stand in as someone working on Dumbo.

Fujikawa was born in Berkeley and named after a Chinese emperor. Given she was born in California in 1908 and was an artist, you will not be surprised to know that she attended Chouinard. In fact, after a year studying in Japan, she became a faculty member there for a while. From there, she moved on to Disney, doing promotional art for Fantasia and creating books for the company. She worked there until 1941—leaving overlap for that to be her in The Reluctant Dragon—and then moved to New York, where she did more promotional art. It was Fujikawa, for example, who created the Eskimo Pie mascot.

1941 was a bad year to be Japanese in the US but a good year to have moved off the West Coast if you were. Fujikawa was able to avoid the internment camps by not being in the military zones of control. She spent the war in New York; her family spent the war in a camp in Arkansas. She worked for a pharmaceutical company while her parents were considered to be a danger to the US by nature of their birth. Interesting to speculate how much art she created during that time that was admired by people who hated the Japanese.

In 1951, she left advertising and became a full-time freelance illustrator, culminating in being approached in about 1956 to illustrate A Children’s Garden of Verse, by Robert Louis Stevenson. She illustrated a few other books by other people, and in 1963, she produced her first book, Babies. From there, she created literally dozens of books of her own. The last of them was published just barely before her death in 1998 at age ninety.

Her art is distinct; once you’re familiar with it, you can recognize at least her human forms. Much of her art involves children without adults in the picture. She is also noted for being one of the first people to illustrate children of multiple ethnicities in her work. It’s not just white children, the way it was common to see children’s books in the ‘50s. It wasn’t just Japanese children, which some people might have expected given her own background. Children are children, after all.