Wilbert Plijnaar started his career working for Donald Duck Weekly in 1972. He wrote and illustrated several stories with characters like ‘Gus Goose’, ‘The Big Bad Wolf’ and ‘Little Hiawatha’, and illustrated numerous covers. In the mid 1970s, he moved to the weekly comic magazine ‘Eppo’ , where he and Jan van Die began writing scripts for the Sjors en Sjimmie comicstrip, modernizing the series and turning it into a success that spun a weekly magazine with the same name.
In 1985, Wilbert Plijnaar meets Hans Buying of the Comic House Agency, setting the grounds for a very successful collaboration. Through a span of ten years, the duo works together on dozens of animation productions per year, rapidly making Comic House one of the largest animation producers in the Netherlands. Plijnaar contributions there are as concept developer, storyboard artist, lay-out designer, background painter, and (co) director.
In 1995, he is hired by Warner Bros and moves to Hollywood to work as a story artist. Since then he contributed to animated features such as Quest for Camelot, Osmosis Jones, Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius, Three ‘Ice Age’ movies, Over the Hedge, Disney’s ‘The Princess and the Frog’, ‘Horton Hears a Who’, Despicable Me 1&2, ‘The Grinch’ and a slew of others.
In 2019, his biography “Rotterdammer in Hollywood” – Written by Peter de Wit ( Sigmund) appeared. The image of Plijnaar that emerges from this coffee-table book full of testimonials is of someone with an unstoppable flow of ideas and jokes, who is too much of a perfectionist to build a large body of work for himself – “The logical consequence was to contribute ideas that were worked out by others,” he tells, “so that the responsibility for the final product did not rest on my shoulders. Otherwise it would never get finished.” We can’t wait to take a peek into his exciting mind and creative process!
