Willie Ito

As a young child, Willie Ito learned to draw on the pages of Sears catalogues while his family was incarcerated at the Japanese internment camp in Topaz, Utah during World War II. He then studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles before joining Walt Disney Studios in 1954 where he became Iwao Takamoto ’s assistant as an in-betweener on the “Lady” unit of the feature film, Lady and the Tramp, illustrating the movie’s famous spaghetti-eating scene.