Walt Peregoy

It’s kind of impressive that they got Walt Peregoy to do narration in “4 Artists Paint 1 Tree” without swearing. Perhaps it’s why his speaking seems so stilted. Peregoy was a surly man of firm opinions. One of them is that Disney’s films were only successful because of him. It’s true, as I’ve said before, that Walt was a showman and advertiser more than an artist. (You’ll note Walt wasn’t painting that tree!) However, Peregoy was only one artist of many, and I’d frankly give more credit to Mary Blair or Eyvind Earle, to name just two. Or, you know, Ub Iwerks, whom I have shockingly not covered yet but whom I have added to the calendar.

Peregoy started his art training at age nine, so even though he dropped out of high school, he had more formal training than a lot of other people, both at what was then the California College of the Arts and Crafts and Chouinard, alma mater of so many animators and other artists. He worked for Walt Disney, but he found it depressingly like a factory and quit. He spent three years of World War II in the Coast Guard, then studied art in Paris and Mexico. In 1951, he returned to Disney.

In fact, a lot of his work there would be alongside Earle. Together, they worked on the magnificent backgrounds of Sleeping Beauty, for one thing. They worked on the design of “Paul Bunyan,” which would go on to be nominated for Best Animated Short at the year’s Oscars. (It lost to “Knighty Knight Bugs,” which is quite the decision the Academy Voters had to make!) He also did backgrounds for such classics as Mary Poppins and concept art for The Jungle Book. It’s definitely true that Peregoy’s style is obvious in Disney’s output of the era if you know his style and know what to look for.

He would later work as an Imagineer, helping to design Epcot Center. I’m not sure how much of his work is still in place there—I’ve never been to Epcot, and I remain bitter about the Mary Blair murals in Tomorrowland at Disneyland—but the style in at least the ‘70s was strongly inspired by Peregoy’s modernist tendencies. He was likely a better fit there than he would’ve been at Disneyland, and the features Disney was making at that time were not as visually creative. One imagines he would’ve felt fairly stifled, given how the studio was going in those days.

Beyond his work for Disney, there is so much more. He worked for Hanna-Barbera, among other things, with animation work that even overlapped his Imagineering work. He was also doing his own painting the whole time. Walt Peregoy may well have been the lesser-known Walt at the Disney studios, but he did more to shape the actual look of the films than the other one. Animation as a whole, really. He even kept working long enough to work on Rocko’s Modern Life and Liquid Television, and it’s not difficult to realize that Walt Disney wouldn’t have appreciated those the way Peregoy would have wanted.