No fairytale ending for animator’s Disney career

AN insult ended the creative partnership behind the Disney company’s best loved movies.

History: Artist Bill Peet working on the Disney film Dumbo in 1941. Out of copyright.

While everyone knows the name Walt Disney, few people know much about the creative geniuses who made his films such a success.

Today is the centenary of the birth of animator Bill Peet who, ­despite his work on many of Disney’s most-beloved films, is perhaps better known today for his offbeat and engaging series of children’s books.

Peet began as an artist but ended up as the writer behind Disney’s great adaptations of classic stories before becoming an award-winning writer of children’s books.

He was born William Bartlett Peed (a name he later changed to Peet) on January 29, 1915, in Grandview, Indiana. His father was an itinerant salesman who joined the army in 1916. When he returned from the war he moved the family to Indianapolis, where Peet remembered seeing lines of tanks being transported on the railway near his home.

As a child he loved to sketch. Spending a lot of time at his grandfather’s farm, his favourite subjects were usually animals. He would hike about the countryside exploring and looking for things to draw.

He sold newspapers to buy a camera that he took on a visit to a Cincinnati zoo. When he realised the shutter wasn’t working and that none of his pictures would turn out he decided he could more reliably record what he saw by taking a sketch pad next time.

He was struggling at school when someone encouraged him to take art and he flourished, going on to win a scholarship to study at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. Many of his early artworks were of animals, farm scenes, slums, circuses and “quaint old characters”.

Leaving art school in 1937, he made some money making greeting cards but, realising that wouldn’t pay the bills, he looked around for better paid work. At the time Disney was looking for artists for his film studio to take on the task of creating feature-length animated movies.

Peet sent some of his sketches with ideas for characters and stories and landed an interview.

After a gruelling selection process Peet won the job, one of three selected from a field of 15 hopefuls. With a steady income coming in, he married Margaret Brunst, who he had met while studying art.

At first Peet worked as an ­inbetweener, an artist who fills in the animation between sketches created by the main animators. In his early days with the studio he was working on a Donald Duck short film, while also working as a sketch artist creating ideas for ­upcoming feature Pinnochio.

The tedium of Donald got to him and he yelled out “No more lousy ducks!”. His outburst could have seen him fired, but instead Disney promoted him to work on creating characters and stories for other films. One of the first was Three Caballeros, on which he receives a writing credit as Bill Peed.

He also worked on the Pastoral Symphony scene for Fantasia (1940), created characters for Dumbo (1941) and worked on Peter Pan, for which he drew Captain Hook as a Walt Disney look-a-like, and Cinderella, for which he created the cat and mice sequences and the fairy godmother. His other credits include Alice In Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians and The Sword In The Stone.

There were many disagreements with Disney over the direction of the story and Disney chided him over Sword In The Stone, which critics claimed had a thin story. Peet’s vision for The Jungle Book was a darker film closer to Kipling’s original story but Walt disagreed. The two also argued about the voice talent for the film.

When Walt insulted Peet’s animation skills on Peet’s birthday in 1964, the artist just walked out of the studio and never came back.

By then Peet was already making a name for his children’s books, the first of which, Hubert’s Hair Raising Adventure, had been published in 1959. His books, often based on bedtime stories he told to his own children, featured familiar animals with human personalities, or fantasy creatures.

One of his final books was Bill Peet An Autobiography, an illustrated memoir for children, which won the Caldecott Medal.

His health deteriorated in his final years, with a heart attack in 1977 being followed by throat cancer in the ’80s. He died in 2002.

Originally published as No fairytale ending for animator’s Disney career