April 24th, 2019: Bill Peet

[xoxoxoBruce]

When Bill Peet was a kid he always had a pad and pencil with him because he liked to draw.
He drew pictures of his friends, enemies, teachers, animals, trees, most any thing that couldn’t get away.
He discovered he was a good cartoonist, an exceptional cartoonist. Bill had only one problem, he didn’t play well with others.
Probably from spending so much time alone sketching and having complete control.

He was hired in 1937, when he was 22, and worked first on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) near the end of its production.
His work as an in-betweener (making up the frames between the key drawings, responsible for the rote chore of providing fill-in drawings to make animated characters like Donald Duck appear to move.) on the Donald Duck shorts was so tedious, he quit, screaming out of the studio, “No more lousy ducks!” Fortuitously, he came back the next day to pick up his jacket and found an envelope, informing him he had been promoted to the story department.

Despite his personality clashes with Disney, Mr. Peet rose through the ranks to contribute Olympian fantasy figures to the segment of ''Fantasia'' set to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony in 1940, and character sketches for the baby elephant star of ''Dumbo'' in 1941.

Ironically unsuited for the team-work involved in film animation, Peet was a highly independent artist. He was, in fact, the only storyman in Disney’s history to have created all the story boards for a feature film, a feat he pulled off not only for The Sword in the Stone, but 101 Dalmations as well.
To be clear, he was the ONLY man to write and animate a film ALONE at Disney, and he did it twice. He was that good.

He wrote his first full-fledged screenplay for ''101 Dalmatians'' in 1961, when Disney asked him to adapt the British author Dodie Smith's children's classic, ''The 101 Dalmatians.'' It was Mr. Peet's suggestion to adapt T. H. White's ''Sword in the Stone'' two years later. Mr. Peet's ambivalent feelings toward Walt Disney can be seen in his characterization of Merlin the Magician, whom he said he patterned after his employer. The character was bad-tempered and argumentative, but a true wizard nonetheless. In his autobiography, Mr. Peet wrote that he even gave the drawing Disney's distinctive nose.

In his autobiography published in 1989, Peet said he drew the evil Captain Hook in "Peter Pan" to resemble Disney.

In fairness to Disney, he would have still made the movies without Peet,
but Peet couldn't have made them without Walt.

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