Stay Tooned: Remembering Walt Peregoy, Disney & Hanna-Barbera Background Artist Dies, RIP (1925-2015)

Walt Peregoy in the early 1960s during the production of The Sword in the Stone (1963), for which he did the background styling.

According to the official D23 Twitter account, the Disney Animation Research Library reported news that Walt Peregoy, the veteran animation artist who worked as the legendary color stylist on Disney's classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians, headed up Hanna-Barbera's background department for a time during the late-Sixties and was named a Disney Legend in 2008, passed away two weeks ago at his home in Encino, California, on January 16 at the age 89.

Edited from Cartoon Brew: Born Alwyn Walter Peregoy in Los Angeles, California, in November 17, 1925, Walt spent his early childhood raised on a small island in San Francisco Bay; Peregoy often described his background as "American white trash." He was nine years old when he began his formal art training, attending Saturday classes at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Berkeley. When he was 12, Walt's family returned to Los Angeles, where he enrolled in life drawing classes at Chouinard Art Institute. He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, and went to work at Disney at the age of 17 in the position of "traffic boy," the lowest-rung employees at the studio who ferried artwork and supplies between offices. He quit after just a few months, saying that the studio felt too much like a factory, and wouldn't return for another eight years.
Following a short stint as a cowhand on the Irvine Ranch and a tour with the Coast Guard during World War II, Peregoy moved to San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato, Mexico, and continued his art education, where he studied painting and sculpture at the University de Bellas Artes "under the influence of [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and [Jose Clemente] Orozco." Later in the 1940s, he lived in Paris where he studied painting. A key influence on him at this time was the French painter Fernand Leger.
In 1951, with a young family in tow, he was rehired to the Walt Disney Studios where "he started at the bottom again." Peregoy initially worked for four years in the animation department serving as an inbetweener, assistant animator, designer and clean-up artist on Peter Pan (1952) and Lady and the Tramp (1955), before production designer Eyvind Earle recruited him to become the first lead background painter on Sleeping Beauty.
Walt's unique style meshed well with that of his contemporary stylist Eyvind Earle, and their work on the Academy Award-nominated short Paul Bunyan (1958) was a departure for Disney. "My style was unusual for Walt Disney, but he tolerated me," Walt later said. Although, since he was "tolerated" for 14 years, the artist sheepishly admitted, "I had to be doing something right."
Walt is perhaps best known for his work on the studio's next feature, 101 Dalmatians, the project that allowed Peregoy to apply his fine art training on a Disney film. "To this day, Walt Peregoy's color styling in One Hundred and One Dalmatians remains a fine example of how color can be used creatively in animation while serving more than a merely decorative function," modern animation authority Amid Amidi once said. As the film's color stylist, Peregoy worked closely with production designer Ken Anderson, helping develop a new way of painting backgrounds. With the background linework printed on a separate cel level (thanks to the innovation of the Xerography process) and overlaid on top of the painted artwork, Peregoy designed the paintings as broad flat areas of color "with the awareness that it was not necessary to go in and render the hell out of a doorknob, or a piece of glass, or a tree."

Color styling key by Walt Peregoy for "101 Dalmatians"

One of Walt's conceptual works made for One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). "There's not another artist in this world that has my color sense," Walt once said. "It's not 'warm' or 'cool.' It's what I feel. How am I going to know what color to put there before I get there? It's really what I feel."

"Peregoy in the 1950s was a true 'Modernist' - a talented fine art painter who brought Modernism to Disney with strong abstractions in both layout and painting technique," Pocahontas art director Michael Giaimo told Amid Amidi when he wrote the book Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. "His work was a purer abstraction of reality as opposed to, say, the beautifully designed but more grounded work of Eyvind Earle."

From left to right: Vic Haboush, Tony Rizzo, Walt Peregoy and Tom Oreb during the production of "101 Dalmatians," 1958

Peregoy continued making significant contributions to other major animated films at Disney including The Saga of Windwagon Smith (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), Mary Poppins (1964), Goofy's Freeway Troubles (1965), The Jungle Book (1967) and finally Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. While at Disney, he appeared in the famous Disney documentary 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree alongside Marc Davis, Eyvind Earle and Joshua Meador. You can see him, introduced by Walt Disney, at 5:40 in the video embed below:

After being let go from the studio in the mid-Sixties, he then started working in television creating backgrounds on Format Film's The Lone Ranger. On that show, he used a daring combination of grease pencil-on-cel with torn-construction paper underneath. He also worked as background artist on The Shooting of Dan McGrew, Quacker Tracker, The Music Mice-Tro, The Spy Swatter, and The Ruby Eye of the Monkey-God. Below, you can see a de-constructed background from the series that shows the grease pencil cel level and the separate color level underneath. "Powerful for Saturday morning, but you couldn't say the backgrounds were Saturday morning crap because they weren't," Peregoy told interviewer Bob Miller.

Grease pencil-on-cel layer of background painting from "The Lone Ranger."

Construction paper level of the same background painting from "The Lone Ranger."

His innovative work on The Lone Ranger led to being signed on at the TV powerhouse Hanna-Barbera in 1968, where he led the background department for five years. He either stylized or supervised the background designs of The Adventures of Gulliver, The Banana Splits Adventure, Wacky Races, The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Cattanooga Cats, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, Scooby Doo Where Are You!, Where's Huddles?, Help!...It's the Hair Bear Bunch!, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, The Thanksgiving That Almost Wasn't, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, Popcorn, the ABC Afterschool special Cyrano, These Are the Days, Davy Crockett on the Mississippi, and Scooby's Laff-A-Lympics.

After serving as background stylist on Emergency +4 and background artist on Raggedy Ann and Andy in The Great Santa Claus Caper, he worked as layout artist on Star Fairies, Galtar and the Golden Lance, Samson and Delilah, Noah's Ark, Moses, Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lion's Den, and Foofur.

In the late-1970s, he returned to Disney's theme park division WED Enterprises, working on attractions and contributing his unique view to the design of EPCOT Center in Florida such as Kraft's The Land pavilion and Kodak's Journey into Imagination, where his influence included concepts, architectural facades, sculptures, and murals for many of the pavilions.

For The Land pavilion at EPCOT Center, Walt designed key elements for the entrance mosaic and central atrium, including the original mural and balloons. His style was also showcased in the boat ride Listen to the Land.

He continued working freelance in the animation industry during the 1980s and 1990s on projects that included My Little Pony: The Movie, Barbie and the Rockers: Out of This World, CBS Storybreak, Tiny Toon Adventures, Happily Every After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, and The Specialists (below), a segment on MTV's Liquid Television:

In later years, Peregoy was an outspoken critic known as much for his colorful profanity-laced tirades against the animation industry as he was for his art. An interview with Peregoy (warning: very crude and offensive language) can be heard on the Animation Guild website (http://animationguild.org/interviews-n-s/). His work was recognized by ASIFA-Hollywood with the Winsor McCay Award (http://youtu.be/9S2zLKbOIxk) for lifetime achievement in 2012 at the 39th Annual Annie Awards.

Walt Peregoy at work at the Disney Studio in 1958.

Animation Guild Prez Emeritus, USC Chair of Animation and author Tom Sito wrote:

The wonderful Walt Peregoy has left us.
One of the last great designers on 101 Dalmatians. He was fun to be around. He ran counter to the image of that Disney artist "Aw-shucks, gee-whiz" gentility. A real salty dog, whose language could make a sailor blush, which is probably why he was not interviewed more.
But he was proud to be a Disney artist, proud of his achievements, and demanded respect for his talent. He encouraged other young artists not to feel bad or be intimidated because they had talent. If you're good, dammit, let the world know.
RIP Walt, a well deserved rest.

"Walt was one of the most talented, difficult, brilliant, ornery, honest artists I ever worked with," remembered Marty Sklar, Disney Legend and former vice chairman and principal creative executive of Walt Disney Imagineering. "He was a prolific artist of subjects he loved: far-out city concepts, shapes and colors. He also loved horses - just look at the anatomy and dynamic movement in his drawings of horses. You knew right away that there was knowledge and love in those drawings! There were few who equaled his work, and I'm so glad I had a chance to work him."
Below, a gallery of artwork by Peregoy: