Born: William Bartlett Peet
Birthday: January 29, 1915
Location: Grandview, IN, U.S.
Alma mater: John Herron Art Institute
Occupation: Inbetweener, Storyboard, Writer
Years active: 1937–1990
Died: May 11, 2002

Bill Peet developed a love of drawing from a young age, filling sketchbooks with drawings. His happiest childhood memories were of growing up in Indianapolis’ outskirts where he and his friends roamed the woods searching for animals. His aim was to catch the creatures so he could study and sketch them.

In high school, Peet was initially uninterested in becoming an artist. However, after failing almost all of his classes, he took a friend’s advice and took some art classes. Bill excelled and eventually received a scholarship to the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. There, he took several painting classes in his first year.

After college, Peet heard that the Disney Studio was hiring artists for their animated films and sent off his portfolio. After a one-month audition process, Bill earned a position as an in-betweener for the Donald Duck shorts. He found the work monotonous, and just as Peet was about to quit, The studio promoted him to the story department based on character sketches he’d submitted for “Pinocchio.” Bill went on to contribute to films from “Fantasia” to “The Jungle Book” as a, converting the story man’s words into concept drawings for the films.

Disney halted normal film production when World War II broke out, switching over to making propaganda films in order to contribute to the war effort. Peet worked on these films as well, and once the war was over Walt made him a fully-fledged story man who also performed as his own sketch artist and created character designs. Bill Peet would become the sole developer of the “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” and “The Sword in the Stone,” animated movies; the only artist to have created all of the storyboards for a Disney animated feature.

Working very closely with Walt Disney, he developed a few short cartoons and worked on the feature films of the period. While respecting Disney’s creativity, Bill often found collaborating with him to be challenging, as Walt could become somewhat inflexible at times.

In 1950, while he was still working at Disney, Bill knew he wouldn’t stay at the studio forever and began considering alternative professions. He chose writing and illustrating children’s books, something he’d considered as a career when he was younger. The bedtime stories he had told his children were the inspiration for many of his ideas, and though some of the tales he planned were turned into shorts at the studio, he wrote and illustrated several books, the first of which, Hubert’s Hair-Raising Adventure was published in 1959.

During this time, Walt Disney himself still reviewed all the work at the studio, making the final decisions to go-ahead or not. As both were strong-willed and passionately creative men, Peet and Disney frequently quarreled about concepts in the films. Following a particularly heated argument about the tone and direction of “The Jungle Book,” Bill quit working at Disney on January 29, 1964, his 49th birthday.

After leaving the studio Peet concentrated all of his efforts on writing children’s books, writing 35 books before retiring in 1990.