The second Disney animated feature that Bill Peet storyboarded entirely by himself, following One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Adapting T. H. White's Arthurian novel was his own suggestion. He shaped the loose, episodic legend into an entertaining film and patterned the wizard Merlin on Walt Disney himself, "even borrowed Walt's nose," a private joke Walt never caught.
Bill had the difficult task of making an entertaining story out of complex Arthurian legends. He patterned the wizard Merlin after Walt. As Bill wrote in his autobiography, "Walt the wizard never knew that I patterned Merlin the magician after him... I even borrowed Walt's nose."
His contribution
The Sword in the Stone was Bill's own pitch, and he did all of the storyboards and character design himself, the second time he had single-handedly boarded an entire Disney feature. During the production Walt phoned him at home one Sunday simply to say he liked the script "so you wouldn't have to worry about it the whole weekend." On another occasion Walt slumped into Bill's chair and confided, "It gets lonely around here... I want this Disney thing to go on long after I'm gone. And I'm counting on guys like you to keep it going." Bill modeled Merlin's face and manner on Walt, a caricature his boss never recognized.
Story sketches
- RELEASED
- December 25, 1963
- DIRECTOR
- Wolfgang Reitherman
- BASED ON
- The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (1938)
- BILL'S ROLE
- Sole Storyman (screenplay, storyboards, character design)
- RUNTIME
- 79 min