The Perspective of Peregoy
- X Rodriguez
- Oct 22
- 8 min read
This week we are looking at two different artists that we are going do a decent dive in. To understand where we want to go, we have to look at where it comes from. We all have our favorite place to eat, I typically prefer asian food, Im sure anyone here has a place and a dish they love from that specific type of cuisine. BUT each one of us has a specific place that makes that thing YOU like "better" than others. So when looking at art and artists, we can like Dragonball for anime then Sailor moon. They are both the same food but not the same chef. Learning to focus your studies helps with knowing how focus your results. One artist in particular who set a huge mileston for this in the world of animation and mastering 3 of the departments of animation (Penciling, Drafting & Render) which most artists were 1 of the at most.
Let's start with this firecracker of a anti-slacker known as, Walter Peregoy:
(When he backhands you, you gain +2 Vitality for all Druid classes.)
You may not know the name, but you know what made him who he was more than you'd realize.
Peregoy was a background animator and student of the fine arts who was among many of the golden age animators that would go on to create the styles and techniques we know today as the "Classic" Disney look. At a young age, Peregoy met Walt Disney, speaking on how he had started from the ground up at the then Disney Studios until the age of 24 when he took a step back after asking for better pay for himself and his family. After the separation, Peregoy became a mason, laying brick, mortar, and a series of skilled architectural works for the better part of 3 years.
During this time, around the 1930s, he studied and painted many works for himself and found himself entranced by the work of the French style of expressionism and Cubists such as André Lhote (5 July 1885 – 24 January 1962) (pictured below).
Architecture and Cubism became a huge part of his work in this time that brought definition in levels to the subject matter, something that in years before with impressionism and the guilded age of art had been seen as a paradoy of the masters up until that point. But in reality anything in hindsight seems clearler than when on the horizon.
These years of archetecture and study helped refine the approach to Peregoy's telling of his observations of the world. We can see in his work around 25-28 years of age
"Where tha fuck did I park my car?"
Eventually, Walt Disney would reach out to Peregoy asking to rejoin the team but this time for a private project with better pay, Ironically only when he would offer Peregoy payment for his skills to lay brick at Disney's home in exchange for a painting. If you have a chance to look up interviews with Peregoy, he mentions his and many of the other artists at the time never being in love with Disney's work that only matched in paramount to his ego, but ey, fuck it. It was a job that led back into what he wanted for his career. And at this point Disney was assembling the upper echelon of a design team who could spearhead animation in to full motion length picutres along side: Eyvind Earle, Marc Davis and Joshua Meadorears
At this point in time most animated shorts were in the form of, "Merry Melodies" by Walter Lantz which held much of the public's attention at the time during cinema shorts and breaks between news reels. But with in house artists such as Bianca Joilie & Hunter Hurter holding down the shorts and magazine divisions, they needed a new avenue for Disney to grow and show who The Bad mother fuckers/ Father fucker in the case of Bianca, were with no room for doubt in yet another ground breaking industry.
Isn't it funny? to be so ahead of your time but knowing that flash in the pans were so common at in the world of the:
Spanish Flu
Stock Market Failure
World War
Great Depression
Prohibition
etc...
You had to get shit done. So much so that even in first place, there was no room at the time for 2nd or 3rd in the already thin chow line.
But that didn't matter, If you're not first, you're last, boy!
"Winnie the Pooh is for Pussies, You hear me Peregoy?" Walt Disney Probably.
This Disney-Suicide Squad got together and started to work on animation stills, character designs and enviorments for their retelling of a classic Brothers Grimm tale
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937)
The art Walter was producing at the time helped with much of the direction of the landscape and tone of the film along side Marc Davis.
Most of the work Peregoy was using took basic shapes of form and cubed out the area to give the impression of the subject. Then, using a formula of warm (foreground) and cool (background) with the centering done in muted tones, it made for an image you could stare at for longer than your average work of art and still find new textures.
After some refinement, he would start to produce storyboards and backgrounds for the film, such as these two examples below:
(It's like looking at Ed Gein's life but with a more messed up Lumiere waiting inside)
After the film came out in 1937, it was a success and a feat to match the times for animation. The issue was that most individuals that were in: Comics, Animation, Writing, Radio
had an average life span of 5 years in the industry while the average life span of an animator and creator at Disney was a mere 3 years. With great success came great opportunity & opprobrium. Disney was pushing workloads and deadlines closer while pushing artists further away in regards to loyalty and respect, and your boy, Peregoy, was one to push back consistently. This pushback on Disney and Walt was one of the few open feuds in the animation community that people had no problem working on projects as long as Peregoy was there to delegate a double dose of "suck my dick, Mick" to Disney and his demands. Peregoy was about the artist, not the one taking credit for one.
No shit, here's an excerpt from a great mini interview about his life and work with Walt Disney.
On Disney: "Walt Disney was a shit…We made Walt. Walt didn’t make Walt. Walt was an asshole."
On New Animation: "There’s nothing on TV or on the screen that’s worth a shit. If I’m insulting some of you, I don’t give a shit, because it’s all shit."
On Hand Drawn Animation: "That was real animation. And even with all the technology [today], it still isn’t that good, is it?"
On asserting yourself as an artist: On Artists Advocating for themselves: "Producers want to be the one, and the art directors want to be the one. If any of you here are artists, assert yourself. I mean it…assert yourself. So tell those bastards to get off the pot…Each and every one of you have talent that you don’t even admit to, but take it in your own hands and run with it…Because who you are—your talent—is the most important thing in this world."
Here is the article if you'd like to get his Gripes of Wrath for yourself:
and Peregoy wasn't alone in this at all"We saw many artists get their start but never their chance to be themselves. We saw even more who never got the opportunity to even show what worlds they could create. Who knows what we missed out on in those think tanks..."
- Peter Doctor (The Hidden Art of Disney's Golden Age)
You had these amazing artists that were put in boxes that only a few could find a voice in, but in reality, at their core, they weren't animators; they were painters and storytellers that we pushed into a gallery where, yes, on one hand, there was the Gallery of Glee, where Disney was pushing Disney, but the ones who were creating what "Disney" truly was had no real voice, almost like how actors and actresses get pigeonholed into a role like a Marvel movie. Only seeing them perform in smaller films to show what they were capable of.
His ability to stick it to the Mickey Man helped keep more artists in the think tanks for years that would see him sit at the bottom of the pyramid, the base that held up the worlds these characters live in. And because most artists rallied towards him, Disney would have to bend the knee in favor of Peregoy and his teams to find their voices for the next 2 decades where we see some of the best use of the "Disney" style from Peregoy's vision and skill. Such as:
Even with all the behind the scenes drama, Walt Disney would use Peregoy and his Heavy Hitters to promote many side projects to show "The Disney Way" such as Stan Lee would later with "How to draw the Marvel Way" in film and publication, encouraging sales but also interest into how you could be "part of the family" one such video is, "4 Artists Draw the Same Tree"
This video took you out to meet the best of the best and join them on the journey to experience a short format master class.
but, Disney was smart and knew that the growing interest in the community of Disney finatics as well as artists that would love to be paid to work would soon out weigh the older more senior artists. And it did.
around 1964 There would be a rift that would see many an artist of the golden age phase out of main production for projects of the SIlver and Bronze era's of Disney, while still welcoming these new younger artists who would work twice as hard for half the pay.
So in tandem, Peregoy went off to work on projects for Hannah Barberra, Harvey and more eventually being picked for a project that was mentioned amongst friends in the famous band you've heard but rarley know
who were helping studio heads look for artists that not only knew how to animate but could bring to life their ideas in a world where only Disney and Warner Bro's reigned surprime on the big and now small screen.
So Peregoy gets the buzz of this small project that The Wrecking Crew is working on for the music and ask if he'd like to take a shot at the background with a fellow animator by the name of, Paul Julian to create the world that would be unveiled to all in 1969.
That show was:
Working over the years in and out of different projects, Peregoy became a household staple for those of us who loved Saturday morning cartoons, the moody and macabre, but most importantly, he was a paradigm for all who believed in what they did while still finding a light to shine on who they were in their assignments.
Peregoy passed away in 2015, leaving behind a legacy that, like most artists, is known to the well-read and tread of the craft, but to the rest of the world, just another background of their favorite movie or TV show with no afterthought of why they love what makes what they love. His lessons of being that voice that stays true to yourself and knowing that you are an artist first before a machine help keep what we make real in the things we love and create.
Doom
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