Bill Melendez, animator, was born on November 15, 1916. He died on September 2, 2008, aged 91

Bill Melendez brought Charlie Brown of the cartoon strip Peanuts to life and “voiced” Snoopy, winning six Emmys in the process. As a young animator he worked at Disney, contributing to Dumbo and Bambi and regularly drawing Mickey Mouse. Other famous characters he brought to life included Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

Born Jose Cuauhtemoc Melendez in Hermosillo, Mexico, Melendez grew up in small town until his mother moved him and his siblings to the US to learn English. He trained at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles before taking up employment with Disney in 1938, at the age of 22. It was an active time at the company; a year after the studio’s first animated picture, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, had been released, there were lots of new pictures in the pipeline. Melendez was set to work on several Disney films which were to become classics of that period, including Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).

Melendez left Disney a few years later after organising a strike for animators’ rights. It led to recognition of a union and did Melendez no harm as he moved on to a job with Leon Schlesinger Productions, later bought by Warner Bros. After a further seven years working on cartoons, including Looney Tunes, he moved into commercials, working on more than a thousand.

It was during one of these, for Ford, that he met the creator of Peanuts, Charles Schulz (obituary, February 14, 2000). Ford wanted to use the Peanuts characters in the advert. Schulz was initially resistant to animating Charlie Brown and Snoopy but was won over by Melendez’s talent. Melendez went on to do so in 25 television programmes, four feature films and numerous cartoons and commercials, several after Schulz’s death. The first Peanuts television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) won him his first Emmy. From this point he also supplied Snoopy’s voice, recording himself speaking nonsense and speeding it up.

Most of the Peanuts work was produced by Bill Melendez Productions, the company he founded with Lee Mendelson in the Sixties. The company, which has studios in London and Los Angeles went on to work on the television version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979) and Cathy (1987).