January 29 - Bill Peet

On this day, in 1915, William Bartlett Peet was born in Grandview, Indiana. Bill was a typical Midwest boy in that he spent hours with his friends in the woods trying to catch animals, hours hanging around the local train station trying to catch a glimpse of the inner workings of the engines and hours getting in the way of the crews trying to set up the Big Top whenever the circus rolled into town. Bill was atypical in that he did all of those things in order to draw them. And whenever a conductor or crew foreman chased him away from what he was trying to sketch, he had already memorized the scene and could pretty nearly reconstruct it perfectly later on.

Bill wasn't terribly interested in a career as an artist, though, and enrolled at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis. After failing every class but Gym, he reconsidered his life choices and started taking art classes. His talent would earn him a scholarship to attend the John Herron Art Institute at Indiana University. In the very first class he took, Bill met a young woman, Margaret Brunst, who would become Mrs. Peet in 1937, the same year Bill began working for a little animation studio in Burbank, California.

Image copyright Disney

After graduation, Bill heard that Disney was hiring artists, so he sent his portfolio off to California. He was accepted for a one month audition period along with 14 other young hopefuls. At the end of the month, Bill was one of only three who passed the test and he was put to work finishing up whatever needed to be done on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When production on the First Feature was finally over, he moved into the Shorts Department as an inbetweener on Donald Duck cartoons. He was less than thrilled by the position. He submitted some character sketches to the team working on Pinocchio, but apparently it took too long for him to get some feedback. One day Bill stormed out of the studio, shouting "No more lousy ducks!" Fortunately, he had to come back the next day to retrieve a jacket he'd left behind. He found a letter on his desk saying he'd been promoted to the Story Department.

Bill spent the next several years as a sketch artist, turning scripts into storyboards for Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo. By the end of World War II, he was a full fledged story man, one who could not only describe a character or scene but draw it too. He contributed story elements to classics like Song of the South, Cinderella, Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Ben and Me and Peter Pan. Bill and Walt worked closely together during this entire period, with mixed results on a personal level. Both men were not only passionate about their work, but both were unyielding when it came to their opinion on something. A minor quarrel blew up between them during the production of Sleeping Beauty, but it clearly wasn't anything too deeply felt. Walt tasked Bill with developing the script for the next film, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, allowing Bill to become the first person to get solo story credit for a Disney animated feature. He repeated the feat on the studio's next movie, The Sword in the Stone, but Stone wasn't as well received as Dalmatians and their relationship wouldn't survive much longer.

Early in production on The Jungle Book, Bill had taken Rudyard Kipling's stories and woven together what he thought was a masterpiece, leaving many of the darker, more dramatic parts intact. Walt took one look at his script, decided that the next movie was not going to be full of sinister tension and told Bill to lighten the whole thing way up. The argument that ensued became almost legendary. It ended with Walt replacing Bill as Jungle's story man and then Bill leaving the studio on his 49th birthday, January 29, 1964.

Image courtesy of Amazon.com

Following his abrupt departure from Disney, Bill became a highly successful children's author and illustrator. Many of the books he published were based on stories he'd developed for his own kids' bedtimes. His cautionary tale about man's relationship with nature, The Wump World, predated Dr. Seuss' The Lorax by a year. His version of Aesop's The Dove and the Ant, where he changed the dove to an elephant of all things, was adapted into a moderately successful children's musical. All told, Bill published 33 children's books over the two and half decades he was active as an author, some of them still in print today. In 1989, he won the Caldecott Honor Book Award for his autobiography, Bill Peet: An Autobiography. Bill passed away quietly at his home in Studio City, California on May 11, 2002, after having survived a heart attack in the Seventies and throat cancer in the Nineties. He was 87.