William Bartlett Peet was an American children's book illustrator and a story writer and animator for Walt Disney Animation Studios.
26 Facts About Bill Peet
2.
Bill Peet joined Disney in 1937 and worked first on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs near the end of its production.
3.
Bill Peet was born in Grandview, Indiana, on January 29,1915.
4.
Bill Peet developed a love of drawing at an early age and filled tablets with sketches.
5.
The young Bill Peet snuck into greeting parties at the train station, just for the chance to see the train's mechanical workings close-up.
6.
Bill Peet memorized the scene and later reconstructed it from memory.
7.
Bill Peet did extremely well and experimented with a broad range of media.
8.
Bill Peet eventually received a scholarship to the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, which he attended for three years.
9.
Bill Peet took quite a few painting classes that first year, and he admitted his paintings were always somewhat macabre.
10.
Bill Peet trekked across the country to Los Angeles and participated in a one-month audition process; only three of fifteen survived the tryouts, and they were rewarded with work as "in-betweeners" on the Donald Duck shorts.
11.
Bill Peet helped here as well but received his big break after the war was over.
12.
Bill Peet's work was so impressive to Walt that he made him a fully fledged story man who handled the sketching end of character design.
13.
Bill Peet was the sole developer of the animated features One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone, the only artist to have created all of the storyboards for a Disney animated movie.
14.
Bill Peet started to paint again at this time, but soon found he had lost touch with the brush.
15.
Fine art had changed dramatically during the years Bill Peet had been at Disney; abstractionism was in vogue and Bill Peet's realistic paintings were out of date.
16.
Bill Peet attempted editorial cartoons but failed there as well.
17.
Bill Peet decided to continue working at Disney, where he developed a few short cartoons and worked on the feature films of the period.
18.
At this point, he was working very closely with Walt Disney; Bill Peet respected Disney's creative genius but found him to be a sometimes difficult man.
19.
Bill Peet described the Disney studio as a "brutal" place, rife with rivalries and jealousy.
20.
Bill Peet reviewed all the work and gave it the final go-ahead.
21.
Bill Peet quit working with Disney and left the company on January 29,1964, which was his 49th birthday, following an especially heated argument with Walt on The Jungle Book.
22.
Bill Peet developed many of his ideas from bedtime stories he had told his children and he wrote and illustrated several books while still at Disney.
23.
Much of the success Bill Peet's stories have enjoyed is due to the memorable themes they contain: trying when there's not much obvious hope, not allowing taunting of others to prevent individual success, finding compromise in solutions and others.
24.
Unlike most other children's authors, Bill Peet did not dumb down the vocabulary of his stories but included enough context to make the meaning of difficult words obvious.
25.
Bill Peet's interment was at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
26.
Justin Marks, who wrote the screenplay for Disney's 2016 live-action Jungle Book film directed by Jon Favreau, had commented that he plans to incorporate elements from Bill Peet's rejected screenplay of the original animated classic into the former film's upcoming sequel:.