Peet also authored some of the most-recognized and loved children's books of the last century such as "The Wump World, "Chester the Worldly Pig" and "Hubert's Hair-Raising Adventure." Whether you knew it or not, Peet's work probably filled up a large portion of your childhood.

Peet's death marks a certain end of innocence in the world of children's animated features. Today's movies feature the hottest computer technology, politically correct story lines, soundtracks by celebrities and even bigger celebrities providing the voices. And, sure, they dazzle the eye. But as children grow savvier and harder to impress and as studios try to outdo each other, the animated feature has become less a simple pleasure and more a rocked-out experience. But can they still make you cry like the heart-wrenching "Baby Mine" scene in Dumbo?

In his personally illustrated, kid-friendly 1989 "Bill Peet: An Autobiography," we're shown not a man determined to make it big or change the world, but one whose life was spilling his imagination out in drawings, hoping to make a living doing so and entertain some folks along the way. Trying his hand at everything from greeting-card illustration and advertising to New Yorker cartoons, Peet's life was one spent pursuing the art and whimsy that he loved. Growing up in the 1920s as an imaginative child who got in trouble for doodling when he should have been studying, Peet honed his skills, drawing illustrations for his high school yearbook and entering paintings in county fair contests.

Peet joined Disney before it was the Disney that we know. Before it was the Disney to be feared and sometimes loathed. "I enjoyed the Disney films I had seen but was never interested in any kind of cartooning," he writes in his autobiography. "Yet [the 1930s] were no time to be choosy." Peet hopped aboard as the studio was working on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, its first feature-length animated film. (Disney has since made nearly 50 more such films.)

Obviously, back then, Disney wasn't the worldwide megaconglomerate of today, but that didn't mean that Walt Disney was not a man to be taken lightly. Peet had the gall, after being forced to trace Donald Duck a few thousand times too many, to erupt in a tirade, marching down the Disney Studio hall screaming, "No more ducks! No more lousy ducks!" Convinced he would be fired, he instead found himself with an additional assignment, working on Pinocchio.

An author of several popular children's books, Peet said he learned how to craft a kid-friendly tale by reading bedtime stories to his young sons. "Those storytelling hours were wonderful fun," he writes, "and their enthusiasm and gleeful responses to my stories made me wonder if other kids might enjoy them too." But it was Walt Disney himself who took a chance on Peet as a writer, assigning him the task of turning the book 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith into a feature script.

Those of us raised in the Michael Eisner era know Walt Disney as the black-and-white guy closing out antiquated programs of "The Wonderful World of Disney," or the subject of an ongoing myth and joke about his supposed cryogenic freezing in Cinderella's castle. Disney loomed large in Peet's life, and the illustrator, whether as an homage or a jibe, found himself using him as a model for Merlin in the Sword in the Stone. "I even borrowed Walt's nose," Peet comments in his autobiography. Despite their issues, Peet paints Disney as all too human, complete with Walt's sad reflections upon his unhappy childhood and his fear that the Disney Co. wouldn't continue after his death.

In his autobiography, Peet describes Disney's mood swings, his willingness to take chances, his competitive side and his keen instinct for entertainment. And Peet spares no detail in describing his bitterness at the way most illustrators at Disney were treated as serfs, and his frustration at not getting credited on a number of films that he worked on. The illustrations in his book of Disney, from screaming tyrant to affable guy, show the love and the hate in their relationship, a relationship one could hardly imagine in today's world of corporate cartooning.

It's a bit difficult to reconcile Peet's friendly, child-loving work with his criticism of Disney. While Peet's work shows the more innocent side of children's entertainment, his career, unfortunately, also showed the growing seeds of what would be come the highly competitive world of Disney as well. Peet eventually left Disney in 1964; he later told Hogan's Alley, an online cartooning magazine, that "Walt's judgment was tainted because he was spoiled by seeing a lot of stuff. His judgment was no longer worth a damn."

Peet went on to a second career as a successful children's book author, penning 35 books, many of which have entered the bedtime canon. And no matter what vitriol Peet nursed, as a storyteller, it was in his nature to illustrate a giant like Walt Disney as of much of a character as any of his other children's tales. In Peet's mind, everybody was a character, every creature could be altered slightly to be a star in its own story, whether it was Walt Disney itself, or Peet's self-allegory, "Chester the Worldly Pig." It was no doubt a wonder to Peet to see what had originally begun as a risky venture develop into a genre worthy of its own Oscar category. However, with the passage of Peet, one also looks back wistfully at the era in which cartoons lost their relative innocence, both onscreen and off.

E-mail Claire Zulkey at clairezulkey@hotmail.com.