Bill Peet, a legendary Disney artist and writer who drew such indelible characters as Dumbo, wrote the screenplay for “101 Dalmatians” and created 35 children’s books, has died. He was 87.
Mr. Peet died Saturday in his Los Angeles home, said Howard Green, vice president of communications for Disney Studios. Mr. Peet had suffered for many years from cancer and heart problems.
“Bill Peet was Walt Disney’s greatest story man and considered to be on a par with Walt himself in terms of telling strong stories with vibrant characters,” said animation historian John Canemaker, author of “Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men” and animation director for the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
“[He] profoundly influenced some of the studio’s greatest features and created some of its most memorable characters.”
Mr. Peet the “story man” was Disney’s logical choice to write the studio’s first screenplay, “101 Dalmatians,” in 1961.
The artist was the screenwriter and also drew characters and directed actors’ voice performances, and he repeated those tasks for “Sword in the Stone” two years later.
The features remained among Mr. Peet’s favorite creations, along with his drawings of “Dumbo” for the 1941 film that first gained the artist personal attention from Disney.
But the two animated feature films were to be the finale of a 27-year love-hate association between Disney and the individualistic Mr. Peet.
Theirs was a prickly relationship, and Mr. Peet conceded in his “Bill Peet: An Autobiography,” published in 1989, that he drew the evil Captain Hook in “Peter Pan” to resemble Disney.
Mr. Peet left the studio in 1964 during creation of “Jungle Book” and asked that his name be stripped from the credits because he didn’t like changes that were made after he left the project, a problem he always attributed to group creation.
“You can’t have a collective idea about what is funny,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “Creative work is a very personal thing. You have to have a single point of view.”
Among the Disney classics featuring his talents are “Fantasia” (1940), “Song of the South” (1946), “Cinderella” (1950), “Alice in Wonderland” (1951), and “Sleeping Beauty” (1959).
He then turned to books as an outlet for his storytelling abilities. Among his titles were “Randy’s Dandy Lions,” “Ella” and “Chester the Worldly Pig.”
