Interviews

1. Dream of Being an Artist

2. Loss When Leaving for Manzanar

3. Camouflage Net Weaving in Manzanar

4. Developing Art Skills in Camp

5. Return to Los Angeles

6. First Portfolio & Disney Interview

7. Interactions with Walt Disney

8. Moving to Hanna-Barbera after 15 Years at Disney

9. Disney vs. Hanna-Barbera

10. Development of Scooby Doo TV show

11. Designing Scooby Doo’s Character

Takamoto,Iwao

Japanese American animator for Walt Disney and Hanna Barbera (1925-2007)

Camouflage Net Weaving in Manzanar

The first job that I got was the weaving of camouflage nets and immediately managed to get ourselves into trouble. A lot of criticism from people assigned by the military to check the nets after we had woven it. We had the patterns underneath and there were two things that if you weren’t very good at it, which I wasn’t, that you did—one was to weave through both nets, the pattern net/reference net and the one you were weaving so they wouldn’t come apart once you were finished, and the other was to make mistakes. I could see them take the net we worked on and put it on the ground and these men would stride around and look at it, finding mistakes all over the place. That was my first job.

California camouflage concentration camps Manzanar concentration camp United States World War II World War II camps

Date: August 6, 1998

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Janice Tanaka

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Iwao Takamoto (April 29, 1925 – January 8, 2007) was a legendary animator for Walt Disney and Hanna Barbera, most famously designing Scooby Doo in the late sixties. Incarcerated at Manzanar after graduating high school, Iwao leveraged his art skills into a job at Disney upon returning to Los Angeles, working on classic animated films like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. He would go on to mentor other Japanese American animators such as Willie Ito, who worked with him on Lady and the Tramp. After leaving Disney for Hanna-Barbera in 1962, Iwao continued animating, as well as producing and directing films like Charlotte's Web (1973) until his retirement. (June 2021)