Iwao Takamoto

Iwao Takamoto
Takamoto (at center) with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera a studio employee, July 14, 1996
Born	April 29, 1925 Los Angeles, California, US..
Died	January 8, 2007 (aged 81) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Heart attack
Occupation	Animator, television producer, film director
Spouse(s)	Jane M. (née Shattuck) Baer 1957–1959 Barbara (née Farber) Takamoto 1964–2007 (his death)
Children	Michael Takamoto, Leslie Stern

Iwao Takamoto (April 29, 1925 – January 8, 2007) was an American animator, television producer, and film director. He began his career as a production and character designer for Walt Disney Productions films such as Sleeping Beauty, Lady and the Tramp and Cinderella. Later he moved to Hanna-Barbera Productions where he designed a great majority of the characters, including Scooby-Doo and Astro and eventually became a director and producer.

Takamoto was Japanese American. His father emigrated from Hiroshima to the United States for his health, and returned to Japan only once, to marry his wife. At 15 years of age, Takamoto graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Takamoto's family, like many Japanese Americans, was forced to move to an internment camp. They spent the rest of World War II in the Manzanar internment camp. It was there that Takamoto received basic illustration training from two co-internees.

Takamoto first entered the cartoon world after the end of the war. Without the benefit of a formal portfolio of his work, he created a sketchbook of, by his own admission, "everything I saw". It was based on this sketchbook that he applied to work at the Disney studios.

He was hired as an assistant animator by Walt Disney Studios in 1945. Takamoto eventually became an assistant to Milt Kahl. He worked as an animator and character designer on such titles as Cinderella, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians.