Animation legend Willie Ito was prepared to retire after a 50-year career as a pioneering animator at Disney, Warner Brothers, and Hanna Barbera in 1999. However, retirement would have to wait when his childhood friend and collaborator, Shigeru ‘Shig’ Yabu, approached him with an irresistible personal request.
“Shig says, ‘I wrote a story, and I thought you might be the one to illustrate it,’” recalls Ito. “As I read it, I realized that there aren’t too many stories about Japanese American internment camps.”
The manuscript serves as the foundation for Hello Maggie, a short, animated film directed by Sheridan College animation professor Tony Tarantini and narrated by Ito. It recounts Yabu’s experiences as an incarceree during World War II at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. In 1942, Yabu and his family were evacuated from their home in San Francisco to the remote and desolate plains of Wyoming. While hopping the fence of the camp to play at a nearby river, Yabu and his companions befriended a baby magpie named Maggie, whose antics provided comfort and entertainment to the community during a difficult three years in the harsh confines of Heart Mountain.
Willie Ito discusses his career with Mindy Johnson at Wondercon 2026.
The film was screened at WonderCon following a panel discussion about Ito‘s five-decade career with author and animation historian Mindy Johnson. The stories coming out of that period may have been bleak, joyless, but Ito wanted to show that there were moments of joy that he and Shig as children experienced.
“Maggie is a good, child-friendly way of showing us enjoying what the government did not want to show. Whenever photographs were taken of us incarcerated, if you were smiling, you had to be miserable,” said Ito. “There was this man when we were in the first grade. He [smuggled] in lenses and camera parts and made his own camera. He took a lot of pictures of us in camp, and we played sandbox football and baseball. It gave the flavor of us having fun.”
Ito and Tarantini worked on this labor of love as much as they could in-between breaks and teaching. Yabu and Ito had self-published the picture book but had trouble getting traction with publication, and the film was experiencing the same types of issues. It wasn’t until Logan Christie and the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation became involved that dedicated funding and distribution sources emerged for the film.
Willie Ito, Tony Tarantini, and James Lopez talk about the production of Hello Maggie at Wondercon.
Before the screening of Hello Maggie, Ito and moderator Johnson talked in length about Ito’s love at first sight with Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and his beloved possession of a ceramic Dwarf piggy bank. This was followed by his family’s evacuation to Topaz in the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing. Hints of Ito’s future career emerged when he used expired catalogs—sought after by internees for fuel in their pot-bellied coal heaters—as drawing materials. He would create simple flip books in the margins of the catalogs.
And when the war ended, Ito was lucky to return to the home he and his parents had owned, while many other incarcerees lost everything. On his dresser sat the beloved ceramic bank, although it was now empty of the coins he had once saved.
Ito then attended college in Los Angeles and went on a tour of the Disney Studios in Burbank, where executives tested his drawing prowess and recruited the young college student to a team involved in the making of the Lady and the Tramp, under Iwao Takamoto’s tutelage. From there, in the early years of televised cartoons, Ito was there at the right time, in what Johnson called the Forrest Gump of animation, eventually working with Chuck Jones and Robert McKimson.
When asked about what Ito would tell new animators today, Ito didn’t miss a beat.
“If you love being a cartoonist, don‘t let your parents say, ‘you have to be a scientist.’ Learn from all the classics that have been done because you‘re always going to learn something new from all of that. And what’s the best thing about doing that? You serve 50 years in the business and then on retirement day…you know, I had one hell of a career.”
Like this:
Loading…
