Lewis Carroll's anarchic dream-fantasy, which Bill Peet worked on for a long stretch and found an endlessly reworked hodgepodge. Multiple storymen kept re-doing different segments, and the lack of a clear through-line frustrated him. His contributions included character work on the Caterpillar and the Queen's croquet sequence.
Bill described his experience on the film candidly in a 1978 interview with Mike Barrier: "I worked on it for quite a while actually, and some parts of it were kind of fun to work with, but the whole thing was a hodgepodge. Different storymen kept re-doing different segments of it, and the last version was the one they used. It wasn't the best version, it was just that they kept doing it over and over until Walt said, 'Hxxl, get the thing out of here.' That's one he didn't want to do, either. He said once, 'That's one we had to do,' and I thought, well that's great reasoning. He wanted all the classics under his belt."
His contribution
Bill contributed story work and character sketches to several sequences, including the Caterpillar scene and the Queen's croquet game. The production was unusually disorganized even by Disney standards, with story material being continuously revised and replaced. The Caterpillar sketch Bill produced is one of the more striking character studies to survive from the production.
Story sketches
- RELEASED
- July 26, 1951
- DIRECTOR
- Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske
- BASED ON
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
- BILL'S ROLE
- Story Artist
- RUNTIME
- 75 min